Your next manager may have three employees and 19 agents. Who’s accountable?

Over the past several months, we have been interviewing CIOs and other senior executives about how AI is changing management. We started with a fairly conventional question: Which parts of a manager’s job will AI automate, augment or leave alone? But the more conversations we have, the more we think this is too narrow for a framing. What we are seeing is not simply a smaller manager role, or a more automated one. AI is unbundling some parts of management while expanding others. The manager role is being reassembled around a different mix of responsibilities. For decades, organizations have bundled a remarkable amount of work into one position called “manager”: gathering information, coordinating people, reviewing work, tracking progress, translating strategy, allocating resources, coaching employees, communicating upward, making decisions and carrying accountability. That bundle is starting to change. At Edward Jones, CIO Kevin Adams has moved part of managerial memory and follow-through into an AI system that tracks context across enterprise programs and committees. At CVS, Alan Rosa described an operating process where agents now prepare the reports and dashboards that once consumed much of a two-hour daily management meeting. The meeting has fallen to roughly 15 minutes and is now…