The painful 'zombie' question managers can no longer avoid: David Richards

Drucker called the consequence “systematic abandonment”. In plain English, it means stopping the activities that once made sense, still draw salary, and quietly crowd out whatever comes next.

For most of the last century, leaders could dodge that question for years. What they knew changed slowly. Strategy could wait. That world has gone.

What we know now changes between one frontier model release and the next, those being the most advanced AI systems available at any given moment. Decisions Drucker imagined being taken every few years are now being forced on companies in months.

You could see the shift in the latest models from Anthropic and its Claude systems. This was not another incremental gain. These models can analyse code, identify vulnerabilities and propose fixes in minutes, outperforming the humans paid to do the same job. That changes the equation.

Work that once required layers of human expertise is being reclassified in real time. Not eliminated entirely, not without oversight, but fundamentally altered in its economics.

The reaction has been telling. Governments, regulators and major financial institutions are now treating this class of capability as something that must be understood and contained.

This is no longer just about efficiency. It is about the boundary of expert work moving. A clarification, because it matters. By zombies, I do not mean people. I mean functions, layers and workflows built for yesterday and never redesigned. The middle manager whose role is to summarise reports for the level above. The centre of excellence that exists mainly to explain itself. The team producing drafts that an AI model can now generate in seconds.

Zombies are not your colleagues. They are the structure around them. And that structure is starting to break.

The evidence is arriving first from America’s corporate giants. Oracle has begun cutting 30,000 roles while investing heavily in AI infrastructure. UPS plans to shed up to 30,000 operational jobs as it consolidates into fewer, more automated hubs and reduces lower-margin volume.

The causes differ. AI in one case. Automation in another. A changing customer mix in a third. What unites them is Drucker’s question.

Not one of those companies would build itself today exactly as it is. Here is the uncomfortable truth.

If I were running a 200-person company again, and I knew the real shape of the business was 25 to 50 people smaller, could I make those cuts? I honestly do not know.

I have hired people across the companies I have built. I know what a job means to a mortgage, a family, a life. Leaders tell themselves people can be redeployed or retrained.

Sometimes they can. Often, at the speed the market now demands, they cannot. That is the part Drucker never quite captured. Abandonment is not a spreadsheet exercise. It is grief, entered into knowingly, because the cost of refusing is greater. Most leaders cannot do it until the market does it for them.

That is how you become Kodak, protecting film long after the digital future was visible. It is how you become Nokia, defending an ageing platform while a new one takes the world.

So here is the question for every chief executive. If you were founding your company this week, would you build what you have now? If the answer is no, the decision is already made. The only question is whether you act on it, or wait for the market to do it for you.

David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs