The clearest sign of a failed AI redesign is a manager spending all day copying context between machines.
This is the Human Middleware Manager. Strategy becomes their prompt. Agent output becomes their summary. Judgment becomes an approval queue. Their calendar fills with handoffs, but they rarely author doctrine or confront customers, operations, and consequences.
The problem is not the manager. It is the architecture. The organization added a new source of cognition without redesigning how intent reaches action. It bolted the dynamo to the line shaft, then kept people in place as belts and pulleys.
People should author doctrine and expose it to reality. Doctrine should carry intent to agents.
Leave the old architecture intact, and every new agent creates more translation, supervision, and contradiction—until your highest-paid people are moving context instead of moving the company.