The "Hollow" Middle: Why AI in 2026 Reminds Me of the 1970s Office
I’ve been spending my morning coffee looking at the latest HR and tech forecasts for 2026, and something caught my eye that felt like a jolt of déjà vu. Reports from firms like Korn Ferry and Deloitte are sounding a warning bell about "hollowing out" the leadership pipeline. They note that while companies are racing to replace entry-level roles and middle-management layers with AI agents, they are inadvertently destroying their "future leadership bench."
As a retired HR executive who started in the trenches in the late 60s, this feels remarkably familiar.
The Efficiency Trap
Back in the day, when we introduced the first wave of "serious" office automation—think early word processors and the mid-70s fax machines—the goal was the same: efficiency. We thought we could just trim the "overhead" and keep the decision-makers at the top.
But here’s what we learned then, and what we seem to be forgetting now: the "middle" isn't just a layer of cost; it’s a laboratory for wisdom.
In my early career, those "entry-level" tasks were where I learned the nuance of human behavior—the subtle art of reading a room or understanding why a policy that looks good on paper fails in the breakroom. When you automate the "grunt work" entirely, you rob the next generation of the friction they need to develop professional calluses.
The Problem with "Agentic" Leadership
The buzzword for 2026 is "Agentic AI"—systems that don't just answer questions but actually execute processes. On thegubblog, I often talk about finding purpose in retirement, but for those still in the game, the challenge is finding a "purposeful" career path when the first five rungs of the ladder have been replaced by a silicon chip.
If the AI is doing the document review, the initial interviewing, and the data synthesis, where does the 25-year-old HR coordinator learn to spot the "red flags" that a machine might miss?
A Thought for My Fellow Retirees
For those of us in Ottawa watching these shifts from the comfort of retirement, it’s a fascinating time. We are the generation that remembers life before the fax, and now we’re seeing life after the human entry-level worker.
My advice to the young folks I still mentor? Don't just learn to use the AI. Learn to orchestrate it. If the middle is hollowing out, you need to jump from "doer" to "director" much faster than I ever did.
As for me, I’ll stick to my blog. The AI can draft my posts, but it can't replicate the 40 years of HR scars that tell me when a "trend" is just history repeating itself in a shiny new coat of code.
