41% of Companies Cut a Layer of Management Last Year. In the Gulf, HR Leaders Should See This Coming.
“New Korn Ferry data shows 41% of companies flattened their management layers in the past year as AI absorbs coordination work. Here's what "the Great Flattening" means for MEA employers.”
Korn Ferry's Workforce 2025 "Power Shifts" survey, which polled 15,000 professionals across ten countries, found that 41% of employees say their organization has already cut a layer of management in the past year. Analysts and HR practitioners have started calling it the Great Flattening, and the mechanism behind it is straightforward: a large share of what middle managers have historically done — moving status updates, coordinating tasks, translating strategy into assignments, compiling reports — is exactly the kind of connective-tissue work that AI agents now handle automatically. When the coordination gets automated, the layer built to do the coordinating becomes harder to justify.
The Strained Leadership Below the Surface
The numbers around the edges of that 41% are the more uncomfortable part. Seventy-two percent of senior executives say they're now stretched thin, absorbing the coaching, context-setting and feedback that used to sit with the managers who got cut, on top of their own strategic workload. Thirty-seven percent of employees say the loss of that middle layer has left them feeling directionless, and 43% report that leadership alignment across their organization has gotten worse, not better. Gartner had flagged this coming as early as October 2024, forecasting that a fifth of organizations would use AI to flatten their structures by 2026, cutting more than half of existing middle-management roles in the process. The pattern is now visible in named companies rather than forecasts — Amazon's October 2025 cut of 14,000 corporate roles was explicitly framed around "removing organizational layers," and Cloudflare's CEO Matthew Prince described his own restructuring as keeping "builders" and letting go of what he called "measurers."
Why the MEA Region Feels the Impact Harder
None of that is a Western phenomenon happening somewhere else. Gulf and wider MEA employers are running two efficiency drives at once right now, and they tend to get discussed separately when they're really the same story. On one track, governments and large private employers across Saudi Arabia and the UAE have spent several years pushing nationalization and productivity programs tied to Vision 2030 and equivalent national strategies, which already put pressure on headcount and layer structure in banking, telecom and government-linked enterprises. On the other, the same institutions are now the most aggressive AI adopters in the region, embedding AI into exactly the coordination and reporting workflows Korn Ferry's data points to. Put those two forces together and the flattening pressure here isn't smaller than the global average — if anything, it's compounding.
Undercutting National Talent Pipelines
The part of Korn Ferry's findings worth sitting with longer than the headline number is the leadership-pipeline warning underneath it: organizations cutting today's middle-management layer are, in the same motion, removing the rung people climb to become tomorrow's senior leaders. That's a real constraint anywhere, but it lands harder in a region that has historically leaned on expatriate senior leadership while investing heavily in building homegrown pipelines through national talent programs. Flattening the org chart without a deliberate plan for where the next generation of regional leadership actually develops doesn't just create a cost saving — it can quietly undercut the very localization goals many of these same institutions have publicly committed to. For HR and people leaders across the region, this is less a headcount question than a leadership-development math problem, and it's one worth solving on purpose rather than discovering by accident in three years.