AI Is Erasing The Org Chart. Six Questions Reveal Who Holds Power Now

There are clear signs that your job title is losing its value at work. From AI labs where most employees share the same generic title to companies eliminating vice-president and senior vice-president roles altogether, the labels that once told you who was in charge are disappearing.

For the last century, your title and headcount told you who held power at work. AI is disenfranchising both in real time.

By the end of the year, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten their structure and eliminate more than half of current middle-management positions, predicts Gartner. The average manager oversaw 12.1 direct reports in 2025 , up from 8.2 in 2013, according to Gallup. Uber is a great example of this. The company cut about 10% of its workforce in September, saying it had reduced the number of employees sitting seven or more layers below the CEO by 20%.

The org chart used to double as a map of power, and the two are coming apart. Workers who want to know where they stand or what a new role may offer need to ask a simple question about their jobs: Who decides?

It's a question that sits at the center of Power On New Terms, a framework I developed through dozens of interviews with senior leaders . Positional power is the title, the seat and the number of people reporting to you. Structural power is the authority to set the terms of your own work, whatever your title says.

It rests on six REVISE terms: Risk, Evaluation, Visibility, Intensity, Scope and Exit. Leaders revise these terms gradually, often before they have a name for what they're doing. When an employer won't make room for the new terms, that's when they take them somewhere else.

Risk is what you're exposed to when the arrangement ends: your income, your health coverage, your reputation and the cost of rebuilding. AI is driving up that last cost fastest. Of the 6.1 million U.S. workers with the highest AI exposure and the least capacity to adapt, more than eight in 10 are women , according to the Brookings Institution. Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant put it bluntly in the Wall Street Journal last month: "The expertise you have today may be obsolete tomorrow."

Cate Luzio spent two decades running multibillion-dollar businesses at HSBC and JPMorgan, then left to fund Luminary , a membership platform for professional women, with her own money. Self-funding put the downside on her and kept investors from setting the company's terms. Luminary now has 15,000 members.

Ask yourself: How much of my income, coverage and reputation depends on this one employer, and who decided that?