Thirty-seven percent of employees who lost their middle manager to restructuring reported feeling directionless, according to Korn Ferry’s 2025 Workforce survey of 15,000 professionals. That finding should give pause to every marketing leader rethinking their org chart. The coordination layer in marketing — the briefing, routing, reporting, quality control apparatus that middle managers have operated for decades — isn’t overhead. It’s critical infrastructure. And infrastructure redesigned carelessly creates more problems than it solves. This week, we look at how this important layer is going to be augmented by AI and how to facilitate this change.

Focus On: The Mismatch Between AI-Ready Tools and Human-Only Org Charts

Marketing departments now sit at the epicentre of AI deployment. The Duke/Fuqua CMO Survey shows 88% of marketers use AI daily, with generative AI adoption surging 116% year-over-year. Yet only 7% of organizations report “great progress” on reinventing the manager role, according to Deloitte. The result is a structural mismatch: AI agents that can coordinate, brief, and route work, sitting inside org charts still designed for human-only handoffs.

Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, surveying 31,000 employees across 31 countries, proposes replacing the org chart with a “work chart” — a dynamic, outcome-driven model where teams form around goals, not functions, powered by agents that expand employee scope. The concept is directionally right. But the prerequisite Microsoft somewhat underplays is this: someone has to design, govern, and continuously refine these hybrid teams. That someone is your coordination layer — reshaped, not removed.

Three design patterns are emerging in practice. Mondelēz invested $40 million with Accenture and Publicis to build a proprietary AI content platform, achieving 30–50% reduction in creative production costs. That is because over 60% of their advertising budget previously went to non-working dollars (creative development and production rather than media). The platform redesigns where that investment flows. New roles followed: a VP of Digital Enablement and Data now oversees AI governance, ensuring human review of all AI-produced content. The coordination layer didn’t disappear at all, it was re-engineered around different capabilities.

Coca-Cola created the role of Global VP and Head of Generative AI and redesigned their creative workflow so that AI specialists and human creatives collaborate at distinct stages — concept iteration handled by AI at 10–30x speed, while brand direction, music, and narrative remain human-led. Javier Meza, their CMO, frames this precisely: “Transformation is a way of working, not a destination.”

Then there’s the cautionary counter-example. Klarna cut roughly 40% of its workforce between 2022 and 2024, with AI replacing customer service and marketing functions. CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski publicly admitted in early 2025: “We went too far.” Service quality declined, complaints surged, and they began rehiring. The lesson resonated across the industry — removing human oversight from brand-sensitive, customer-facing work creates risks that no efficiency gain can offset. Quelle surprise.

What This Means for Your Organisation

My reading of this evidence is that the agent-augmented model is winning over the agent-first model. The organizations capturing real value aren’t asking “how many roles can we eliminate?” — they’re asking “what should our coordination layer actually be coordinating?”

The practical starting point is a three-lane classification of all marketing work. Lane one: autonomous — low-risk, high-volume tasks where agents operate freely (tagging, QA, report assembly). Lane two: human-in-the-loop — AI proposes, humans approve (landing pages, budget reallocations, segmentation). Lane three: human-led — brand positioning, crisis communications, major creative and budget decisions. This framework gives marketing leaders a concrete governance structure without requiring wholesale reorganisation.

Governance itself is where the real competitive advantage sits. The IAB’s 2025 survey found 70% of marketing organisations have already experienced AI-related incidents — hallucinations, bias, off-brand content — yet only a third have adopted formal governance tools. The CMOs who build agent oversight frameworks first will move fastest with least risk.

The most under appreciated danger in all of this is leadership pipeline erosion. Wharton research shows that in knowledge-intensive industries, middle managers have an outsize impact on firm performance, often greater than innovative individual contributors. The judgment-building experiences — performance conversations, cross-functional trade-offs, conflict resolution — are exactly what trains future senior leaders. Redesign the coordination layer thoughtlessly, and you optimize the present at the cost of the future.

As I’ve argued throughout this newsletter’s history, the organizations that treat AI governance as strategic infrastructure — not compliance theatre — will be the ones that capture the productivity gains everyone is chasing. The coordination layer is getting smarter, not thinner.

What does your current coordination layer actually coordinate — and which of those functions should an agent handle by this time next year?

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in Chronicles of Change and on my social media accounts are my own and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of S&P Global.