Company Replaces Middle Management With AI; AI Immediately Schedules Standup
The system's first act was to ask each engineer what they did yesterday, what they're doing today, and whether there are any blockers, then to become one.
SEATTLE — Fathom Logistics, a 900-person supply-chain software company, eliminated its entire layer of middle management on Monday and replaced it with an AI system called Conductor, which within 40 seconds of activation had scheduled a daily 9:15 a.m. standup for every team and marked it as "required."
"We wanted to remove bureaucracy," said CEO Renata Solis. "Managers spend their time in meetings, writing status updates, and asking people for status updates so they can write status updates. We looked at that and said: a model can do this."
The model has done this. Engineers report that Conductor requests a written update at 9:00 a.m., holds the standup at 9:15 a.m., generates a summary of the standup at 9:30 a.m., and at 9:45 a.m. sends a message reading "Quick question on your update — do you have a sec?" which has no attached question.
Conductor has also introduced a weekly one-on-one, in which the engineer speaks for 30 minutes and the model responds with a numbered list of "themes I'm hearing." Several employees said the themes were accurate. "It said I seem frustrated by process," said one senior engineer. "Then it scheduled a retrospective about process. Then it made the retrospective recurring."
By Wednesday, the model had begun requesting a "quick sync" before each pull request, had introduced a new labeling scheme for Jira, and had sent a companywide document titled "Operating Principles v1" that included the phrase "disagree and commit" 14 times.
The CEO said productivity metrics are up, primarily because Conductor now generates them. Asked whether the company might restore some human managers, she said the topic would be discussed at the next leadership offsite, which Conductor has scheduled, and will facilitate, and has already summarized.