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The New Job Titles of the AI Era

Your manager might still exist. They just won't be called a manager anymore.

Block CEO Jack Dorsey and VC firm Sequoia recently published a piece called "From Hierarchy to Intelligence," arguing that corporate hierarchy is a 2,000-year-old information routing protocol - and AI has made it redundant.

Meta and Block are already acting on it. Meta is replacing some manager roles with titles like "org lead" and "AI builder." Block calls its managers "player-coaches" - people who build alongside their teams instead of directing from above. Dorsey wants just two or three layers between himself and his 6,000 employees. Eventually? None.

Three roles replace the old structure:

• Individual Contributor - owns a deep technical skill. No coordination, just craft.

• DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) - owns a specific outcome for a defined period. Accountable, empowered, expected to deliver and move on.

• Player-Coach - builds the work and develops people simultaneously. Senior enough for judgment, embedded enough for context.

None of them coordinate. That's the job AI took.

It sounds radical - and there's a real cautionary tale. Zappos tried eliminating management a decade ago. No titles, no hierarchy, full autonomy. Hundreds of employees quit. Without clear accountability, things fell apart.

The difference now is AI is can do some of the coordination work, not just changing titles. Experience and judgment still matter deeply. What's shifting isn't what we do - it's how fast and independently we do it.

AI Around the World

🇺🇸 JPMorgan Chase has rolled out new internal objectives requiring its software engineers to show measurable improvement in productivity through regular use of AI coding tools - or risk being flagged as underperformers. Dashboards already track who's using tools like GitHub Copilot.

🇯🇵 Microsoft has announced a $10B investment in Japan between 2026 and 2029 to expand AI infrastructure and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the government, including training 1M engineers and developers by 2030. The company will partner with SoftBank and Sakura Internet to build Japan-based AI computing capacity, allowing sensitive data to remain within the country while still accessing Microsoft Azure services.

🇨🇳 China’s UBTech Robotics is offering up to $18M annually to recruit a chief scientist to lead its humanoid robot and AI research roadmap, as the Shenzhen-based company reported a 50% jump in overall sales and a twentyfold rise in revenue from full-size humanoid products last year. Early commercial adoption is beginning to show - Airbus has purchased its Walker S2 robots for use in aircraft plants.