It is Tuesday of your first week. The chair has gone home, HR has left you a printed org chart, and your coffee is going cold beside it. You trace a line from your desk to the person who actually speaks to customers. Seven boxes. Seven people between you and the front line, each one receiving information, tidying it and passing it on.
You ask a simple question about a late delivery to your biggest account. The answer arrives on Friday, in a slide deck, after four people have touched it. Nobody was lazy. The structure did exactly what it was built to do.
Here is what nobody in the handover will tell you. That structure was built for a world where information had to be carried, summarised and checked by people. Every hand-off is a relay hop, and every hop costs you time and money. That world has gone.
Every layer you inherit is a delay. Slower to respond, costlier to run.
Get this right in your first 90 days and you will run a faster business with fewer, better managers, before the board starts asking why costs have not moved. Get it wrong and you will lose the people who quietly hold the place together.
Three chapters:
- Most of the job is relaying, and AI now removes the hops.
- What AI cannot carry.
- Your first 90 days, and the risks that will bite.
1. Most of the job is relaying
Ask any manager to describe their week. You will hear about meetings, status updates, chasing numbers, consolidating reports, rescheduling, checking someone else’s first draft and answering the same policy question for the fifth time.
Microsoft’s analysis of Microsoft 365 usage found the average employee spends 57% of their time communicating, in meetings, email and chat, and 43% creating (Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023). Middle managers sit at the centre of that traffic.
Look at the list again. Status reporting, consolidation, scheduling, first-line review, policy questions. AI tools now handle each of these well enough to change how you design the organisation. They can pull the weekly numbers from three systems, write the summary, flag the exceptions and answer “what is our overseas travel policy?” at 11pm without waking anyone.
Salim Ismail, author of Exponential Organizations, put it bluntly: “Middle management often exists to consolidate, summarize, translate, and manage approvals. AI is better at that.” (Salim Ismail, LinkedIn)
The big firms have already moved. In 2023 Mark Zuckerberg told Meta staff that “flatter is faster” and that the company would remove multiple layers of management, noting that many managers had only a few direct reports (Meta). In 2024 Andy Jassy asked each of Amazon’s senior leadership organisations to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025, citing “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings” (Amazon). Gartner predicted that through 2026, 20% of organisations would use AI to flatten their structure, eliminating more than half of current middle management positions (Gartner). Each of those moves takes out relay hops. Fewer hops, faster answers, lower cost.
Every layer you inherit is a delay. Slower to respond, costlier to run.
Must remember: if a role exists mainly to move information between two other people, it is a delay, and AI can now take out most of it.
2. What AI cannot carry
Now the other half, because this is where new CEOs get it wrong.
AI can relay. It cannot be accountable. It will not sit with a supervisor whose father has just died. It will not decide which of two good people gets the promotion, tell your biggest customer the truth about a late order, or call time on a bad contract. It does not coach. It does not carry the can.
Ismail draws the same line: roles built around shuffling information will struggle, while roles built around “judgment, creativity, trust, and direction will expand” (LinkedIn).
So the question for each manager is not “can AI do your job?” It is “how much of your week is relay, and how much is judgement?” Strip out the relay and a good manager can lead far more people, because the time goes where it matters: decisions, coaching, customers and people.
Situation: you have inherited a structure designed to move information through people.
Complication: AI now moves that information faster and cheaper, but the same layers also hold judgement, relationships and knowledge nobody has written down.
Action: take out the relay, keep the judgement, and widen spans around the managers who are best at the human part of the job.
Must remember: compress the relay, never the judgement.
3. Your first 90 days
Days 1 to 30: map it. Get the real org chart, not the intranet version. Count the layers from you to the customer. Count the span of every manager. Mark every role where most of the week goes on collecting, summarising, checking or forwarding. Those are your relay roles, and each one sits between a question and its answer.
Days 31 to 60: pilot one function. Pick one with clear output, such as finance, customer service or operations reporting. Put AI on the relay work, widen spans and measure what you already track: cycle time, errors, customer response, management hours freed. Ask the team what broke.
Days 61 to 90: redeploy before you cut. Your best relay managers know where the bodies are buried. Move them into customer, commercial or operational roles where that knowledge earns money. Get what they know written down before anything changes. Tell people what you are doing and why. Silence breeds rumour, and rumour costs you the people you most want to keep.
Then watch four risks.
Tacit knowledge. The manager who “just knows” which customer needs a call before month end is not in any system. Capture it before the role goes.
Overloaded survivors. Wider spans only work if the relay work has genuinely gone. If it has not, you have loaded the same work onto fewer people.
The hollow pipeline. Gartner itself warned that flattening can break mentoring and learning pathways and leave junior workers with fewer development opportunities (Gartner). Decide now where your future senior leaders will learn the job.
The law. Propose 20 or more redundancies at one establishment within 90 days and collective consultation applies: a minimum of 30 days before the first dismissal for 20 to 99, 45 days for 100 or more, plus an HR1 notification to the Redundancy Payments Service (GOV.UK). Since 6 April 2026 the maximum protective award for failing to consult has doubled from 90 to 180 days’ pay (Employment Rights Act 2025, s.30), and the government expects to change the threshold itself in 2027 (DBT guidance). Below 20, you still need fair consultation. Take employment advice before you announce anything, not after.
Every layer you inherit is a delay. Slower to respond, costlier to run. The people in those layers are not the delay, and the best of them are your future.
Must remember: map, pilot, measure, redeploy, then cut. In that order, and inside the law.
The recap
Your org chart was built for a world where people had to carry information. Much of what middle managers do is relay, and every relay hop slows the answer and adds cost. AI now takes out most of those hops. What it cannot do is judge, coach, decide and own. Use your first 90 days to map layers and spans, pilot in one function, measure, redeploy good people and stay inside UK employment law.
The outcome: a flatter, faster business where you are two or three steps from the customer, not seven.
I have seen a version of this before. I led the Anglia team that built the first bank-to-bank ATM sharing network, the one that became LINK. The lesson stayed with me: once a network can move information, the structures built to carry it by hand have to change. It is happening again, inside your business.
Every layer you inherit is a delay. Slower to respond, costlier to run.
If you are a newly appointed CEO and want a hard second look at the org chart you have inherited before the board asks the question for you, email me at ceo@johncorr.com. One conversation. You will leave with a clear view of which layers are delay and which are judgement.
Sources
- Microsoft Work Trend Index 2023, “Will AI Fix Work?”: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
- Salim Ismail, LinkedIn post, “AI won’t replace people. But it will replace meaningless roles.”: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/salimismail_ai-wont-replace-people-but-it-will-replace-activity-7434954710891208704-KJZN
- Mark Zuckerberg, “Update on Meta’s Year of Efficiency”, 14 March 2023: https://about.fb.com/news/2023/03/mark-zuckerberg-meta-year-of-efficiency/
- Andy Jassy, “Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teams”, Amazon, 2024: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/ceo-andy-jassy-latest-update-on-amazon-return-to-office-manager-team-ratio
- Gartner, “Gartner Unveils Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2025 and Beyond”, 22 October 2024: https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-10-22-gartner-unveils-top-predictions-for-it-organizations-and-users-in-2025-and-beyond
- GOV.UK, “Making staff redundant: Redundancy consultations”: https://www.gov.uk/staff-redundant/redundancy-consultations
- Employment Rights Act 2025, section 30: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/36/section/30
- Department for Business and Trade, Employment Rights Act factsheet, “Collective redundancy”: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/69610356d71fc48238c117a8/collective-redundancy.pdf