AI is eating the management class - but that's good news for founders: David Richards

A proper chief executive is installed, usually someone fluent in dashboards, board packs and the solemn theatre of management.

For 40 years, this looked sensible. AI may be about to make it look absurd.

Marc Andreessen, who in 2011 wrote the Wall Street Journal essay “Why Software Is Eating the World” and was proven right within a decade, has been arguing recently that something similar is now happening to management itself. He is worth taking seriously, because his record on calling the direction of technology is among the best of his generation.

The historical case is not new. James Burnham saw it coming in 1941. Modern capitalism, he argued, would no longer be ruled by owners or inventors but by managers, by the people who administered the machine rather than the people who built it. For most of the 20th century, he was right.

Scale required bureaucracy, bureaucracy required managers, and managers gradually persuaded everyone that they, rather than the founders, were the adults in the room.

AI now attacks the very work that made that class indispensable. Much of modern management is not leadership. It is translation, summarisation, coordination and documentation, the business of turning meetings into actions, actions into reports, reports into board packs, and board packs into the next meeting.

Strategy decks, budget narratives, risk registers, performance reviews and the endless grey plumbing on which large organisations depend are all precisely what the new language models do well, more cheaply every quarter, and without requiring an office or a pension.

So a question now ought to be ringing around every British boardroom. If software can do the management layer, what is the management layer actually for? The honest answer is: much less than the managerial class has trained itself to believe.

This opens a third model: the visionary founder, name on the door, paired with an AI layer that handles the administrative scaffolding of a global firm. Call it Henry Ford with a 1,000 silent assistants, or the Steve Jobs archetype finally operable at FTSE 100 scale.

The bargain that justified pushing builders aside, that scale required bureaucracy and bureaucracy required suits, no longer holds.

Britain is especially vulnerable to this mistake because we are so easily seduced by polish.

We like the grown-up voice, the tidy board pack, the executive search candidate who has “scaled before”. Too often, we mistake fluency for judgment and process for leadership. Then we wonder why the company loses its edge, why product slows, why the founder who once moved at the speed of conviction is now signing off on quarterly OKRs from a glass office.

None of this means leadership disappears. Quite the opposite. Taste, courage, judgement and accountability become more valuable, not less. But those qualities were never the monopoly of the professional manager. In many technology companies they sat with the founder all along, while the machinery of management slowly buried them.

So, a question for every chair, fund manager and non-executive director still tempted to install a “proper” CEO the moment things get serious. Make it a harder question than usual. Are they adding leadership, or merely adding a layer that AI is about to remove?

The founder with taste, technical depth and commercial courage was always rare. The manager with a board pack was not. AI is about to make that distinction impossible to ignore.

David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs