Many middle managers are asking some variation of this right now. Silently because saying it out loud seems like betraying the belief that maybe there is no room for you.
So lets say it aloud and really look at it
The unmentionable part of the job
Be honest about how much of a regular week actually plays out. The whole of it – a large slice at least – is routing: the transport of information from place to place. You are getting status from the team and pushing it up. You retrofit priorities from above into tasks down below. You keep the backlog in order, you see who is blocked and you chase down the update that was never sent.
It's real work. It keeps things moving. And these are precisely the type of tasks AI is quickly becoming proficient at. You train on data (up to October 2023), but there are a lot of summaries, status roll-ups, backlog hygiene, and "Who's waiting on what" — these are other things that a machine can do a lot now and will do even more in 2024.
That brings some gravity to the question: if the routing goes, what does the job look like?
What remains (and why its the good bit)
Two things survive. Turns out those are the two that were always the most important.
The first is sensemaking. Your team is always emitting signal: fragments of unfinished sentences in standup, a tone in a message, three people whispering anxiously about the same thing. Routing is not a matter of turning that into an actionable call for leadership. It's judgment. This is where a summary tool can inform you of what it stated. It cannot inform you of what it means, or which blaze is real and which will fizzle out.
The second is accountability. Owning the outcome when the going gets tough. Training one person over months until a button is pressed. And finally, be the name on the result, not just its messenger. The thing you can't delegate, because a non-human is not going to be accountable, and no model will take that off you.
The real risk
And this is not just my opinion, it is an actual pitfall worth seeing clearly.
You never have a meeting on your calendar for sensemaking or accountability. They're invisible. Routing, on the other hand, is super visible — it is the reports, the updates — every one sees a neat board.
Visible work is easy to defend against a reorg, or when restructuring comes knocking — invisible work is easy to cut out. Thus the threat was never "AI replaces the manager". It is the hidden danger that AI silently takes away the obvious half of the job, and you are left with all the things nobody ever wrote down, explaining why they matter.
That is the reason middle management is typically by far and away the hardest stratum to change in an AI change. Not that managers are resistant, but they know how to show the part of their job that a machine cannot replace. Behind the scenes, everybody had a glimpse of the routing, so the routing became your identity.
The question worth sitting with
The Fetch supplies the better view, seen in two parts; a half-cocked and bolted pair. What it leaves is ever so slightly the part that was always really the job. The good and bad of judgment, the calls that need to be made, the people.
But when you have no routing, what half would you defend to the actual death?
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