AI is starting to do more than speed up work. At consulting firms and inside big enterprises, it is also pushing managers to oversee wider teams, trim layers of approval, and make decisions without sending everything up and down the ladder first. McKinsey senior partner Alexis Krivkovich says that could make corporate org charts flatter.
On ”The McKinsey Podcast,” Krivkovich argued that AI can give leaders a ”superhuman” ability to manage across bigger scopes, which would let companies flatten their structures and move faster. The pitch is elegant, if a little ruthless: fewer middle layers, fewer handoffs, less time spent waiting for someone to weigh in.
Why companies want flatter org charts
Krivkovich said companies have added at least one layer between the CEO and the front line over the past decade, and in some cases two or three. That is not just an org-chart aesthetic problem. More layers mean more salary cost, more coordination, and more chances for a decision to stall while it gets blessed by everyone in the chain.
The broader business case is simple enough: AI can become the extra pair of hands that middle management never had. In an era when companies are under pressure to do more with less, flattening is appealing because it promises both speed and savings without requiring a heroic reorg memo.
Where AI agents fit inside the org chart
The shape of this overhaul will not look the same everywhere. Krivkovich pointed to life sciences, where ”squads of agents” could accelerate innovation, while departments such as human resources, finance, and legal are obvious candidates for automation and redeployment of people toward other work.
- Life sciences: agent-driven research and development support
- HR, finance, legal: routine tasks pushed to AI agents
- Leadership: wider spans of control with fewer approval steps
That is also why this trend is spreading beyond consulting. Factory chief technology officer and cofounder Eno Reyes said the org chart is likely to become ”more flat horizontally,” while IBM senior vice president Mohamed Ali expects new management systems to emerge as the company adds ”digital workers” alongside its 150,000 human workers. In other words: someone still has to set the guardrails, but the people doing the steering may not be the only workers on the road.
The management problem AI creates
The catch is that flatter companies are not automatically better companies. AI can reduce friction, but it also shifts the burden from managing people to managing systems, permissions, and output quality. That is a different job, and one that will probably expose which firms were using hierarchy as a substitute for actual control.
Expect the first wave of winners to be companies that already know where decisions get stuck. The rest may discover that flattening an org chart is the easy part; teaching an organization to trust AI enough to move faster is where the real work starts.