An uncomfortable thought, isn’t it?
It provokes instant resistance.
Here’s what’s true:
business administration is losing value in classic functions: controlling, reporting, standard analysis, market research, financial modelling. A controller or logistics specialist who crunches data in Excel or SAP? Gone in five years. Maybe three.
But that’s where the simple story ends.
What will NOT disappear:
no board signs off an M&A deal because the AI recommended it.
No supervisory board holds a CEO liable for something an algorithm suggested.
No bank lends 50 million on the strength of a machine’s analysis.
What can’t be automated, political capital, stakeholder management, accepting liability, trust, becomes more valuable.
“Oops, that went wrong. We’ve sunk 10 million euros. Go and ask Monsieur Claude!”
A general business degree is no longer simply proof of competence. In my day, it opened doors to networks, social status and careers.
What’s happening structurally right now:
Middle management is disappearing.
It was never a real leadership layer (I was part of it once), just information brokerage: passing data up, translating instructions down. An algorithm does that faster today. Hierarchies flatten because the case for intermediate layers has gone.
Accountability becomes a problem.
Who is liable for AI decisions? The CEO? The programmer? The owner of the model? Legal and compliance aren’t shrinking; they’re growing, because the liability questions haven’t been answered.
Power concentrates at the top.
Strategic decisions converge on fewer people. A flat hierarchy looks like democratisation but has the opposite effect. In the end, what counts is who controls the algorithm.
Hiring collapses across the board and explodes at the top.
As executive search consultants, we see this trend clearly. A company with 500 business graduates shrinks to 50, but not to zero, because negotiation and representation still need people. What’s in demand now are IT architects and data scientists, the people who build the machine.
The uncomfortable truth:
when an organisation’s knowledge sits in a machine, power shifts radically to those who control it: owners, IT architects and the few remaining managers who hold the monopoly on interpretation.
AI concentrates knowledge in a black box and moves power there with it.
For business graduates: the run-of-the-mill degree becomes worthless for standard tasks. For real leadership roles with responsibility, a specialised degree becomes more valuable.
For companies: the illusion of flat hierarchies will look like this in future:
a top that controls and a base that executes.
For society: a new concentration of organisational knowledge. That’s the future of control.
What would you tell your son or daughter studying business today?
