Shark tank India judge Anupam Mittal on AI warning: ‘Managers will hate me for saying this…Al is not coming for coders first, it …’

Anupam Mittal, the founder of People Group and a popular judge on Shark Tank India, has sent a warning to companies in India, saying that AI agents are now taking over work of certain employees, like the middle managers. He said that posts like “VP of Operations” may be axed first, and the future belongs to those who can build and code with Gen AI. In a LinkedIn post, the tech entrepreneur warned that the “knowledge premium” traditionally held by senior leaders is rapidly evaporating.

Anupam Mittal’s full LinkedIn post on job cuts due to AI agents

Managers will hate me for saying this

AI is not coming for coders first

It is coming for middle managers

In the old world, seniority was a proxy for "knowing the process" & "coordinating the work"

You got paid more because you knew who to call and how to get things doneToday, that "knowledge premium" has dropped to 0I have invested in companies doing 300 to 1000 crore ARR with around 50 employees, supported by a suite of AI agentsThe "VP of Operations" who doesn't actually operate anything is an endangered speciesThe future belongs to the "Individual Contributor Plus"People who can build, code, create or sell while using Gen AI to do the work of an entire departmentIf your job is primarily "coordinating" as a go-between, without adding quantifiable value, you are overheadAnd in a high-interest-rate world, overhead gets trimmed ✂️

Google, Amazon flattening their hierarchies

Last year, two of the big tech giants – Amazon and Google – also announced that they are removing middle managers as both of them looked to thin their managerial workforce but continued to hire for specialised roles.

In March, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy indicated that the company is putting more power in the hands of employees doing the work, instead of middle managers who want to “put their fingerprint on everything” but haven’t been always making the right recommendations.

“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,” 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 reportedly moved forward with flattening its management structure in one of its most profitable divisions, eliminating an entire layer of middle managers in its US advertising sales unit. According to an internal memo obtained by Business Insider, the restructuring affected the Google Customer Solutions (GCS) division, which serves midsize advertisers and manages what Vice President John Nicoletti described as “a portfolio the size of a Fortune 100 company”. The changes essentially removed the “Managers of Managers” layer across several teams.