AI tools are thinning out management layers, so coordinating directly with peers is becoming a career skill
Phanish Puranam, Piyush Gulati and Arianna Marchetti separate AI used to produce work from “OrgTech”, technology that changes how organisations coordinate and assign authority. Their study of 3,000 US public firms (2010–2019) found that adopting collaboration tools like Jira and Slack cut managers per employee and shifted coordination onto non-managers. “Vertical” OrgTech concentrates oversight in managers; “lateral” OrgTech spreads decisions across peers. Which one a firm gets depends on how it deploys the tools.
The technology does not decide the outcome; how an organisation deploys it does. Heavier monitoring points to vertical, more peer-level decision rights to lateral. Where it is lateral, skill at resolving problems with colleagues and negotiating handoffs is increasingly how non-managers get recognised, because there are fewer managers to escalate to.
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