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Anupam Mittal added that AI can now handle much of that coordination and information-processing faster and more cheaply, meaning the special value managers once had is disappearing
Anupam Mittal, a popular judge on Shark Tank India, has weighed in on the growing uncertainty of job loss with the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI). Mittal, who is also the founder of People Group, asserted in a LinkedIn post that AI will not rob the jobs of coders, but could be risky for middle managers.
Mittal, terming it a 'bitter truth', stated that in the old world, middle management held prominence because they knew the process, knew the right people, and coordinated work between teams.
"Seniority was a proxy for knowing the process and coordinating work. You got paid for knowing who to call and how to get things done. That knowledge premium is now zero," he said.
Mittal added that AI can now handle much of that coordination and information-processing faster and more cheaply, meaning the special value managers once had is disappearing.
He mentioned that roles such as “VP of Operations” could be the first to be cut, and that the future belongs to those who can build and code with Gen AI.
"I’m invested in companies doing 300–1000 crore ARR with ~50 employees and a stack of AI agents. The 'VP of Operations' who doesn’t actually operate anything is an endangered species.
The future, in my view, belongs to the ‘Individual Contributor Plus’.
People who can build, code, create, align, or sell—using AI to do the work of a 20-person team.
Sure, AI is not the answer to everything, but it’s excellent at non-deterministic workflows and unstructured data.
Exactly where managers once excelled.
If your job is mostly coordination, with no measurable output, you’re overhead.
And in a high-interest-rate world, overhead gets cut," Mittal wrote.
Amazon and Google cut middle management
Last year, tech giants Amazon and Google revealed plans to reduce their middle management teams, focusing instead on hiring for specialised roles. In March, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy explained that the company aims to empower employees who are directly doing the work, rather than rely on middle managers who often try to “put their fingerprint on everything” but don’t always make the best decisions.
“You add a lot of people and you end up with a lot of middle managers. And those middle managers, all well-intentioned, want to put their fingerprint on everything,” the CEO said in an interview with Bloomberg. “So you end up with these people being in the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the pre-meeting, for the decision meeting, and not always making recommendations and owning things the way we want that type of ownership,” he added.
Similarly, Google is said to have streamlined its management structure in one of its most profitable divisions, removing an entire layer of middle managers from its US advertising sales team.
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