In a strong message to corporate leaders, Anupam Mittal, founder of People Group and a judge on Shark Tank India, has warned that artificial intelligence is already replacing certain job roles. According to him, middle management positions could be the first to feel the impact, not coders.
In a LinkedIn post, Mittal said AI agents are now capable of handling many tasks traditionally done by managers. He explained that the long-standing advantage of senior leaders, known as the “knowledge premium”, is rapidly disappearing.
“Managers will hate me for saying this AI is not coming for coders first It is coming for middle managers,” he wrote.
He added that in the past, seniority meant higher pay because people knew the processes and whom to contact to get things done. That advantage, he said, has now dropped to zero.
Mittal shared that he has invested in companies generating between 300 crore and 1,000 crore in annual recurring revenue with only around 50 employees, supported by a suite of AI agents. He warned that roles like “VP of Operations” could soon become irrelevant.
“The “VP of Operations” who doesn’t actually operate anything is an endangered species,” he said.
He also explained that the future belongs to what he calls the “Individual Contributor Plus”. These are people who can build, code, create, or sell, while using generative AI to perform the work of entire teams.
“If your job is primarily “coordinating” as a go-between, without adding quantifiable value, you are overhead And in a high-interest-rate world, overhead gets trimmed,” he added.
Mittal’s comments come at a time when global tech firms are also restructuring. Last year, Amazon and Google announced efforts to flatten their organisational hierarchies and reduce middle management.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company wanted to empower employees who do the actual work rather than layers of managers.
“You add a lot of people and you end up with a lot of middle managers. And those middle managers, all well-intended, want to put their fingerprint on everything,” he said.
He added, “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.”
Google also reportedly removed an entire layer of middle managers in its US advertising sales unit. An internal memo described the move as a step to eliminate the “Managers of Managers” layer.
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