For yonks, the corporate machine has carried a lot of hidden weight. Layers of jobs built not around producing or selling anything, but around talking about producing or selling. Maybe you already feel like your whole career lives in calendars and inboxes. If not you, I'd still wager you see it all around you - all those "managers" whose main contribution is a meeting invite. Would the business stop working if they were gone? Everyone knew this layer was bloated but most just kept quiet, because it paid well enough and looked respectable on LinkedIn. Not anymore, AI is here and the gloves are off.
The growth of empty work
This isn’t new. In 2015, YouGov found that 37% of British workers believed their jobs made no meaningful contribution. David Graeber called them bullshit jobs - roles designed to prop up the appearance of productivity rather than create any. These BS roles flourished in the late 20th century, when corporations fattened on cheap capital and cheap credit, and again after the 2008 crash when armies of “project managers” and “coordinators” were hired in the name of efficiency.
But the numbers show how little efficiency came of it. Since 1970, US productivity growth has slowed dramatically, even as the number of “professional and managerial” roles ballooned. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment in management occupations in America has grown by over 80% since 1983, while output per worker in many service industries has barely moved.
Meetings as output
The modern office long ago confused activity with results. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index shows workers spend 57% of their week in meetings, email, and chat. McKinsey puts the average share of the week devoted to email alone at 28%. And the pandemic only made things worse: Harvard Business School found the number of meetings per worker jumped 12.9% globally in 2020, and average meeting length fell, meaning more interruptions and less flow. And the anecdotes back up the data, we all know it, those overly long meetings full of well paid people sat there on mute and gaining nothing valuable.
If a factory ran its machines all day and produced nothing, it would be shut down. Offices, by contrast, have congratulated themselves on being “busy.”
The AI reckoning
Unfortunately for some, in the new age of AI busyness no longer works as a defence. Love it or hate it, it's hard to deny how pointless it now feels having five people in a room to agree on the phrasing for a slide. AI does it better and in the blink of an eye. Boston Consulting Group found consultants using AI delivered work 25% faster and 40% better. Accenture estimates 40% of working hours can be automated or augmented. Goldman Sachs projects 300 million jobs will be reshaped worldwide, with the majority in white-collar coordination work. The game is well and truly up for low-value Outlook careers.
Why do I feel so sure? Simply, the money is too big for boards to ignore. Morgan Stanley believes Corporate America could save nearly $1 trillion through AI adoption, with 90% of jobs affected in some way. And you need to forget the laughable idea about the coming of the work/life balance era, that's not what will happen. People should be prepared for organisations removing costs by removing expensive people whose output doesn't create measurable value and/or can be automated.
Who is really at risk
Not the frontline. Nurses, builders, drivers - hard to automate them at scale (for now, that tech is a couple of years behind). Not the boardroom, either; CEOs still preserve their right to decide (again, for now). It’s the middle, the layer of “knowledge workers” who exist to pass updates around and have "catch ups" who are exposed the most. The “project lead” whose job is pasting numbers into reports. The “change manager” whose week is three workshops and a write-up. For these types of roles, the game is up.
Employers will call it streamlining. They’ll talk about agility. But the truth is simpler: if you were designing a company from scratch today, how many inbox managers and calendar coordinators would you hire? Exactly!
These Outlook jockey roles have already started to evaporate. Some will be attacked and removed fast, others will fade away slower over time through natural attrition that’s never replaced. Fast or slow the result is still the same... these roles are going the same way as the dinosaurs.
The social problem
This hollowing out isn’t just a workplace story. It’s a class story. For decades, middle-class stability has been built on jobs that looked professional but were largely administrative. They paid well, offered progression, and gave the children of the middle class somewhere to land.
Take those jobs out and it’s not just the wage bill that shrinks. You start pulling apart the economic scaffolding that has held up the professional middle class for decades. Which is why I believe this shift will reach far beyond company walls.
I'd go as far as to say, this hollowing out of the middle class will change societies, especially in markets given the monika of "knowledge economy". But WEF says new roles will created and there'll be a balancing out? But what are these “new roles” being created by AI? I'm yet to hear or see anything convincing to back up this claim. Whereas I often see experts forewarning that this will be the start of an employment catastrophe – such as Mo Gawdat, covered on EBN here, and Roman Yamploskiy.
Curtain call
Graeber suggested that many bullshit jobs existed to sustain the illusion of necessity - to give people a reason to exist inside the corporate pyramid, and to make those above look and feel more important. But this illusion can no longer live on in a world of AI tools and agents. A full inbox is no longer protection. A jam-packed calendar is no longer evidence of productivity. Those “catch-up calls” that were always more about ego or ritual than anything meaningful are now a sentence in an AI summary.
The middle is about to be undone by software that quietly does their job before they’ve managed to schedule a meeting about it.
How do you feel about this? Are you worried about the hollowing out of white collar professions or are you glad to see the slow death of pointless meetings, cacthups, alignment sessions and a slew of other corporate cliches?
Takeaways
Pointless work is common
Over a third of workers admit their jobs add no real value (YouGov, 2015).
AI's reach is massive
AI could automate up to 40% of working hours and reshape 300 million jobs.
The money talks
Corporate America could save nearly $1 trillion by cutting Outlook-heavy roles.
The middle is most exposed
It’s coordinators and managers in the middle who face the sharpest cuts.
Meetings are a mirage
The “meeting and email” layer of work is being hollowed out, fast.
Sources
- YouGov (2015). 37% of working British adults say their job is not making a meaningful contribution to the world. https://yougov.co.uk/society/articles/13005-british-jobs-meaningless
- Microsoft Work Trend Index (2023). Will AI Fix Work? https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/worklab/work-trend-index/will-ai-fix-work
- McKinsey Global Institute (2012). The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/technology-media-and-telecommunications/our-insights/the-social-economy
- Harvard Business School (2020). Collaborating During Coronavirus: The Impact of COVID-19 on the Nature of Work. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/mrcbg/programs/growthpolicy/collaborating-during-coronavirus-impact-covid-19-nature-work Working paper: https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/27612.html
- Boston Consulting Group (2023). Flipping the Switch: Generative AI’s Impact on Knowledge Work. https://www.triangulateknowledge.com/blog/the-impact-of-generative-ai-on-knowledge-work
- Accenture (2023). Generative AI and the Future of Work. https://www.accenture.com/content/dam/accenture/final/accenture-com/document/Accenture-A-New-Era-of-Generative-AI-for-Everyone.pdf
- Goldman Sachs (2023). Generative AI could disrupt labour markets. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/generative-ai-could-raise-global-gdp-by-7-percent
- Morgan Stanley (2025). Corporate America and AI cost savings. https://fortune.com/2025/08/19/morgan-stanley-920-billion-sp-500-savings-ai-agentic-robots-jobs https://www.axios.com/2025/08/19/ai-jobs-morgan-stanley https://sea.peoplemattersglobal.com/news/funding-investment/ai-could-save-companies-dollar1-trillion-morgan-stanley-43163
- Graeber, David (2018). Bullshit Jobs: A Theory. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
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