Jack Dorsey envisions AI to permanently replace middle managers in the corporate ladder

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, while drawing a comparison with the historical Roman army's chain of command and a modern-day corporate organisational chart, has said that generative Artificial Intelligence technology has the potential to not only improve productivity but also reduce manpower, in particular, eliminating middle managers' roles, to run companies more efficiently.

Dorsey cited that the Roman army had a decanus, who led eight soldiers (a group called a contubernium) in his command. His superior called a centurion who controlled 80 such contuberniums. Six centuries made a cohort, and 10 cohorts formed a legion, which formed around 5,000 soldiers ( 8-->80-->480-->5000). At each layer, a named commander held defined authority, aggregated information from below, and relayed decisions from above.

Over the years, military operations have evolved to make decisions faster and execute orders. Dorsey made an interesting observation citing Napoleon's army's decimation of Prussian forces in the Battle of Jena in 1806. After the defeat, a group of reformers led by Scharnhorst and Gneisenau rebuilt the military around an uncomfortable truth: you cannot depend on individual genius at the top. You need a system. So, they created the General Staff, a dedicated class of trained officers whose job was not to fight but to plan operations, process information, and coordinate across units. Scharnhorst intended these staff officers to "support incompetent Generals, providing the talents that might otherwise be wanting among leaders and commanders."

"This was middle management before the term existed. Professionals whose purpose was to route information, pre-compute decisions, and maintain alignment across a complex organisation," Dorsey noted.

We still see similar systems in place in modern-day Army hierarchy and in corporate companies, which we call it the corporate ladder.

With the advent of gen AI and Agentic AI, companies are planning to incorporate such technology to slim their workforce.

For the uninitiated, an agentic AI is an advanced programme that operates independently with minimal human supervision. Once tasked, it will work, and if faced with any issue, it is capable of solving the problem and moving to complete the job. Most of the white-collar roles, such as software coding and testing, are expected to become redundant.

Dorsey's Block has already implemented agentic AI tech in their firm, which has not only reduced desk jobs but also managerial roles.

Dorsey has come up with a plan that eliminates managerial roles in the chain of command.

Dorsey said that everything the employees work on, the company creates artefacts. Every decision, discussion, code, design, plan, problem, and progress all exist as recorded actions. It's the raw material for a company's world model.

So, in a traditional company, a manager's job is to know what's happening across their team and relay that context up and down the chain. In a remote-first company where work is already machine-readable, AI can build and maintain that picture continuously. What's being built, what's blocked, where resources are allocated, what's working and what isn't. That's the information the hierarchy used to carry. The company world model carries it instead, and this eliminates the middle manager's role.

With middle manager roles permanently eliminated, Dorsey wants to keep three types of contributors-- 1) Individual Contributors (IC) who build systems, 2) Directly Responsible Individuals (DRIs) who solve specific problems independently, and 3) Player-Coaches who both contribute and mentor others.

Dorsey's Block, a fintech company which is running the business in profits, recently laid off 4,000 of its 10,000 staff. Now, with the new company policy, it plans to reduce the workforce further.

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