AI is causing companies to flatten hierarchies, reduce middle management, and reorganize work around skills, multidisciplinary teams, and the integration of machines, humans, and robotics.
As businesses increasingly integrate artificial intelligence across their operations, traditional corporate organizational charts are undergoing dramatic change, according to speakers at The Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute’s Technology Council Summit. Companies are moving away from pyramidal, hierarchical systems toward flatter, more agile frameworks organized around individual contributions and skills rather than reporting lines.
One major consequence is the shrinking number of middle managers. More executives now oversee larger, more multidisciplinary teams rather than cascading layers of oversight. Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, for example, “oversees more than 50 people,” reflecting this shift in leadership span. Sastry Durvasula of TIAA warned, “We’re going to have to rewire the whole company … I believe that 80% of the jobs will change at least 20% by AI. And 20% of the jobs will change as much as 80%.”
Another key trend is the merging of technology and human-resources functions to plan work in ways that integrate human capabilities and AI tools. At Moderna, the HR and digital/IT teams have been combined under one leader to enable what the company calls “work planning”—not just workforce planning—incorporating what can be done by AI as well as by people. Tracey Franklin, Moderna’s chief people and digital technology officer, said: “We looked at that and said: It’s actually all how work gets done. And so we need to start doing something that we call work planning.”
Additionally, firms are facing trade-offs between hiring human talent and investing in compute and infrastructure (GPUs etc.), especially as AI becomes a central component of their capability stack. The overall shape of corporate structures, according to observers, is more like a “barbell” than a triangle—with many individual contributors and a thinner middle management layer, led by executives with wide oversight.
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