AI to make managers who only hold meetings and manage people irrelevant: Airbnb CEO

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says managers who mostly run meetings and track staff may lose relevance as AI reshapes work.

In Short

• Chesky said managers must understand details of work, not just supervise
• He argued recurring one-on-ones and oversight-heavy leadership styles will not survive
• Coinbase linked a 14% workforce cut to efficiency gains from AI

AI is already changing how companies hire, code and operate. Now, some tech leaders believe it could also make an entire category of managers irrelevant in the workplace. According to Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, as artificial intelligence continues to reshape how companies operate, the age of “people managers” may soon come to an end.

Speaking on the “Invest Like The Best” podcast on Tuesday, Chesky said managers whose jobs mainly involve holding recurring meetings, tracking employees and overseeing teams without directly contributing to the work itself may no longer remain useful in the AI era. “I don't think people managers will have any value in the future,” Chesky said during the podcast conversation. He added that “people who have lots of recurring one-on-ones are not going to survive” and that such a leadership style “is not going to work”.

That does not mean managers themselves will disappear from company hierarchies. Instead, Chesky argues that, to stay relevant, managers will need to stay closely involved in the actual work being done by their teams.

“You don't manage the people, you manage the work,” he said. He added that if someone is a lawyer, “you have to actually read the case law, and you have to get involved.”

The idea here is simple. With AI taking up more work, managers in the AI age will need hands-on expertise and deeper operational context rather than acting only as coordinators between teams, according to the Airbnb chief.

And Chesky is not alone in hinting at changes in how management roles could evolve. His comments come at a time when more technology companies are cutting jobs, flattening organisational structures and increasingly relying on AI tools to improve productivity with smaller teams.

Just this week, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced that the cryptocurrency exchange would cut around 14 per cent of its workforce, affecting roughly 700 employees, while also reshaping the company around AI. In a memo shared publicly on X on Tuesday, Armstrong said Coinbase needed to become “leaner, faster, and more efficient” as AI dramatically changes how work gets done.

Armstrong said he had watched engineers “use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks”. He also announced that Coinbase would flatten its organisational structure to a maximum of five layers below the CEO and COO. Most notably, Armstrong declared there would be no more “pure managers” at the company. “Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams,” he wrote in the memo.

The Coinbase CEO also revealed that the company is experimenting with “one-person teams” and smaller AI-native pods where employees manage fleets of AI agents. According to Armstrong, the future workplace will rely less on large management hierarchies and more on smaller, highly productive teams supported by artificial intelligence.

A similar message has also been shared by Twitter co-founder of and Block CEO Jack Dorsey. Earlier this year, Block laid off more than 4,000 employees, or nearly 40 per cent of its workforce. During the company’s earnings call in February, Dorsey said that “a smaller team using the tools we're building can do more and do it better.

He then said that wants to build AI deeply into the company’s operations and restructure teams around three kinds of roles: individual contributors, directly responsible individuals, and “player-coaches” who would effectively replace traditional managers. “There is no need for a permanent middle management layer,” wrote Drosey in blog published in March.

- Ends