“What does middle management do?” For a hundred years, the answer seemed self-evident. They kept teams aligned. They checked on project status. They translated the vision from above and summarized results from below. The marketing hierarchy was as much a fixture as the company website or the annual budget spreadsheet.
Middle management, a layer built for a world where information was scarce and needed to be routed, reported, and repeated up and down the chain, is fast becoming obsolete. The coming agentic AI revolution is rewiring the entire structure, altering how marketing and PR teams have been built since the industrial age.
The old chain of command
I recently listened to my buddy Brian Halligan interview Block CEO and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Roelof Botha on his “Long Strange Trip” podcast. They discussed the recent Dorsey and Botha article “From Hierarchy to Intelligence”.
Both the podcast and the article are worth your time if you want to really dig into this topic.
For most of corporate history, the basic org chart has looked a lot like a Roman legion. As Dorsey and Botha write, the Roman Army’s information-routing system, with an explicit span of control at every level, was the prototype for the modern corporation. Later, the Prussian and American military evolved the idea by adding a layer of dedicated staff just to process information, coordinate plans, and keep generals from making irretrievable mistakes.
Later, when railroads started spanning hundreds of miles, they copied these structures out of necessity. You needed middle managers to keep bad things from happening in distant places. They didn’t set strategy. They didn’t invent or create. Their job was to ensure the trains, and eventually the marketing plans, ran on time.
Hierarchy was information technology for a world without computers, instant data, or AI.
AI eliminates hierarchy
With agentic AI, we can eliminate the need for humans whose sole purpose is managing, reporting, or routing information. Today’s AI-driven systems fundamentally reinvent who does what and why.
In the new marketing and PR organization, senior strategists work at the top, interacting with the C-suite to align with overall business objectives. They make the kinds of judgment calls that only humans should.
Creators, those who develop campaigns, content, and real-time programs, bring those strategies to life, directly and collaboratively.
In the middle? Increasingly, nothing. The agentic AI layer has absorbed the old managerial relay.
This is also true of how organizations communicate with their agency partners. Instead of updates trudging up the chain and watered-down context dribbling back down, an AI system can continuously monitor, summarize, and distribute what needs to be known by the organization and its agencies in real time. AI keeps score, flags bottlenecks, and predicts when red flags will pop up.
The human edge has moved out to the creators and up to the strategy team.
Real time intelligence
In this new world, the intelligence lives in the system, Dorsey and Botha write. “The people are on the edge. The edge is where the intelligence makes contact with reality. People reach into places the model can’t go yet. They sense things the model can’t perceive: intuition, opinionated direction, cultural context, trust dynamics, the feeling in a room. They make the calls the model shouldn’t make on its own, especially ethical decisions, novel situations, and high-stakes moments where the cost of being wrong is existential. [This approach] gives every person at the edge the context they need to act without waiting for information to travel up and down a chain of command.”
True agentic AI can operate as a digital co-worker, handling priorities, queueing creative briefs, delivering analytics, and automatically updating cross-functional teams across multiple platforms.
In this new world, meetings that once existed just to coordinate and reassure are simply not needed anymore.
You're probably already feeling this: status updates are being replaced by shared dashboards. Project managers are increasingly outnumbered by direct contributors. The myth that “someone needs to manage the managers” is becoming hard to defend when you can see every campaign, every pitch, and every outcome in real time.
The next-gen marketing team
At the top of a modern marketing team, you have a tight group of experienced marketers and communications pros who set strategy in close partnership with senior leadership. Their job is vision, direction, and translating business goals into actionable priorities.
At the “edge” of the team are the creators and practitioners: writers, designers, event planners, content producers, influencer relations specialists, data analysts, and similar roles. These are the people who make strategy happen, using AI as a true digital collaborator. In this world, AI is an empowering force to amplify their impact.
The middle, those who managed status, summarized updates, and relayed context up and down, simply isn’t necessary anymore. Real work can flow directly from those who strategize to those who create.
If you’re ready to rethink your marketing and PR org chart, here are takeaways from this transformation:
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Middle management that exists only to report, route, and repeat information is on the way out. Those roles must now be redeployed to either strategic leadership or hands-on creation.
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Leadership must double-down on clear communication, human judgment, and vision setting. Let AI handle the process and status.
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Creators win. Those who bring unique ideas, produce compelling content, or build audience relationships, augmented by AI, become the backbone of the modern marketing team.
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Real-time transparency, trust, and collaboration become must-haves. With agentic AI, everyone sees (almost) everything, what matters now is how you respond, iterate, and adapt.
If you’re leading a marketing or PR team, your new job is to create an environment where bold ideas, creative risk, and genuine human connection can thrive, supported and accelerated by the intelligence in your systems, not hemmed in by the pyramid of old.
While a change like this can be scary, I’m thrilled that this allows marketers to double down on a true human connection with customers, building fans and growing business.
We have an opportunity use this new freedom not to become more robotic, but to become more human, more responsive, and more fan-focused than ever.
