Maybe we should stop sh*t talking managers.

The most important people in the workplace are frontline managers.

Not CEOs. Not heads of IT. Not strategy teams sitting in conference rooms at HQs building decks about the “future of work.” What happens if your VP of Marketing doesn’t show up tomorrow? Probably nothing. A few meetings get pushed, but most employees won’t even notice.

Now consider what happens if a store manager doesn’t clock in. Or a shift supervisor. Or a line lead. The doors don’t open. The shift falls apart. Employees and customers feel the impact immediately. And the business loses money.

That’s the difference.

Nearly 80% of the global workforce is on the frontline in industries like retail, manufacturing, healthcare, food service, construction, grocery, hospitality, and transportation. The vast majority of people experience leadership through frontline managers, not corporate executives. For roughly 2.7 billion people, a frontline manager – the person who hires them, trains them, schedules them, coaches them, pays them, answers their questions, and actually knows their name – is the company.

And yet somehow, managers have become one of the easiest groups to dismiss – especially of late.

There’s a growing chorus of “thought leaders” claiming AI will eliminate managers. The argument usually sounds something like:

AI can handle repetitive tasks like scheduling, monitor productivity, summarize conversations, track performance, and automate communication. Therefore, managers will soon be unnecessary.

Brian Chesky recently boosted the conversation by expressing doubt that people managers “will have any value in the future.” He went argued that leadership styles centered around recurring one-on-ones “are not going to survive.”

Honestly, this perspective makes a lot of sense – if your worldview is shaped primarily by software companies, desked work, and corporate offices buried in hierarchy. In those environments, excessive management can absolutely gum up the works with superfluous administration (complex approval processes, excessive status updates, back-to-back meetings, etc.).

But most of the working world isn’t a software company.

This is yet another example of the frontline being left out of the future-of-work conversation. Frontline managers don’t exist in vast numbers to add complexity. Their job is to navigate constant operational pressure with limited time, limited resources, and limited margin for error. Every shift, they’re dealing with staffing shortages, customer issues, safety concerns, interpersonal conflicts, operational disruptions, and unpredictable situations while still being expected to hit the targets handed down from HQ.

That’s a very different kind of people management, and it deserves a very different conversation when it comes to organizational value and the role technology should play in enabling it.

You might read these comments and assume they’re talking about corporate managers, not frontline teams.

Unfortunately, I’ve had the same conversation multiple times over the past year with people making similar claims about managers in restaurants, retail stores, hotels, and other frontline operations. They posit small operations teams can monitor locations remotely using AI, cameras, and real-time data. Therefore, organizations no longer need managers on-shift at all times.

I always offer the same response:

What happens when a rogue customer sets the building on fire and you don’t have a manager on-site to take control of the situation, protect employees, calm customers, coordinate emergency response, and make real-time decisions under pressure?

Because that actually happened to me as a frontline manager!

That’s the part of management these conversations ignore. The role is about far more than tracking tasks, hitting numbers, or making sure operational boxes get checked. The job requires sound judgement, fast decisions, constant problem solving, and lots of empathy. And when sh*t does hit the metaphorical fan, the company needs someone ready to take control.

It’s hard to fully understand and respect what frontline managers do every day if you’ve never lived the reality of the job yourself.

The truth is most companies haven’t allowed frontline managers to lead people in a long time. Instead, they’ve overloaded managers with administration, buried them in reporting, turned them into communication middlepeople, drowned them in compliance requirements, and forced them to react rather than lead.

Now, we’re trying to define their value based on this distorted version of the role.

Of course, AI can replace a lot of this work. It should. But that doesn’t mean the role inherently lacks value. It means we designed the job wrong. According to McKinsey, only 11% of companies shape manager roles to prioritize coaching and team development. The Chartered Management Institute (CMI) found that 82% of managers step into leadership roles without formal training. Many frontline operations already rely on “working managers” built directly into labor models, meaning they spend most of their shift working alongside their teams while trying to squeeze coaching, development, and management responsibilities into whatever time remains.

Think about how absurd that is.

We promote people into the most operationally critical leadership roles in the business, provide almost no preparation, slash labor hours, overload them with administrative work, and then publicly debate whether they’re still necessary. Of course, there are managers who aren’t good at the job and shouldn’t be in the role. But in far too many cases, frontline managers struggle because the system sets them up to fail.

This is our real manager problem.

To be clear, AI absolutely should change frontline management.

Staff scheduling should be automated so employees know when they’re working weeks in advance based on business needs. Managers shouldn’t have to spend their days approving shift swaps, fixing payroll errors, or digging through dashboards. And employees should be able to quickly find answers to common questions without always needing to ask their managers.

The goal shouldn’t be to replace managers. It should be to remove administrative burden so managers can spend more time running their businesses, serving their customers, and leading their teams.

The best frontline managers — the people running your highest-performing locations with the lowest turnover and strongest CSAT scores — do things AI can’t replicate. They build trust. They understand context. They notice when someone is struggling or lacking confidence. They know that letting an employee leave a few minutes early for their kid’s soccer game can foster goodwill that benefits the team long after that shift ends. And they make sound judgment calls when the environment gets messy, emotional, and confusing.

This work matters.

Scott Galloway showed he gets it when he said:

Every generation of executives has a fever dream of flattening the organization. The version from the 1980s was called Reengineering. But the truth is, management is the connective tissue in any organization. A lot of companies are about to discover that institutional memory was not inefficiency, it was the f*cking company.

Leadership is more than information transfer, especially on the frontline.

Stop insulting frontline managers! Instead of looking for ways to replace them to protect the bottom line, start looking for ways to elevate the role to grow your business.

Leverage technology to remove friction rather than adding noise. Automate low-value admin tasks so managers can spend more time coaching team members, developing your talent bench, and delivering exceptional customer experiences. Remember: we’re talking about the group that leads 80% of the global workforce. This isn’t a side conversation. This is the future of work.

We have the tools to craft a workplace operating system that gives frontline managers the time, capacity, and permission to lead. But first, we have to fix the job.