Who Manages the Agents
Faisal Masud thinks the middle of the org chart is going. "I think that what AI is demonstrably doing immediately is that those additional layers of management are just not that necessary anymore".
HP's president of digital services sees the replacement in retail. Assistant buyers become agents, and the people above them stop managing people. "Actually, IC's managing agents." Masud sells the software that monitors those agents, so read it partly as a pitch. He still names the gap. "Because agents not going to have any responsibility on those, right?" And: "But fundamentally, managers will have to know a lot more than just managing."
Dan Mishin has already deleted the layer. The Manifest OS founder reread the classic management manual and decided "it's completely irrelevant for this age." His engineering team runs as pairs, one AI engineer and one lawyer, with agents keeping teams from duplicating each other. He has stopped hiring for the old job. "If I hear that a person wants to be a professional manager, in technical roles, I'm not interested." Manifest sponsored the episode.
Meagen Eisenberg, who turned up in SaaS Says last week buying AI tools, is building them too. Samsara's CMO has 113 agents in production. "So I've kept headcount flat this year." Building agents is now part of the review. "You can't get a 4 or 5 the highest rankings unless you're actively working with AI, building agents." She is already planning the problem that follows. "Because imagine you built an agent and you leave a company, you know, who monitors, who manages that".
HubSpot's marketing leaders draw the conclusion. Kipp Bodnar: "the people on your team, they all have to have good management skills because they're managing AI agents and systems and tools." The management layer did not disappear. It moved onto everyone.
Some of the load lands on review. Newsela CTO Dee Wilcox cut development time roughly in half with AI and watched code review stretch from about a day to about four. "I've got one team shipping like 1500 line PRs and there are code reviews through the roof". Fewer layers, more output, the same number of people checking it.
Alex Atallah of OpenRouter, which routes between models for a living, warns against the shortcut of one agent that does everything. "the more work you give it to do, the more understanding of what's going on, you're sacrificing. And yet, no one, no one knew is taking responsibility for that sacrifice understanding." His own general agent: "And it's just like impossible to improve this agent."
Gartner's Noha Samara offers the corrective for anyone counting savings. "Instead of thinking of how much head count can I reduce? I should be thinking of how many more scenarios, can I evaluate how many faster root cause analysis I can do?"
Last week the question was whose name goes on the claim. This week it is whose name goes on the agent.
Sources: Interviews from Product School (Sep 30, Faisal Masud of HP), The Modern People Leader (Oct 2, Dan Mishin of Manifest OS), GTMnow (Sep 29, Meagen Eisenberg of Samsara), Marketing Against the Grain (Oct 1, Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan of HubSpot), Dev Interrupted (Sep 29, Dee Wilcox of Newsela), a16z (Oct 3, Alex Atallah of OpenRouter), and Supply Chain Now (Sep 30, Noha Samara of Gartner).
Operators describe flattening org charts as agents take over monitoring work, while asking who owns and reviews the agents once the managers are gone.