The bottleneck at the top
Daniel Miessler's Companies Are Just a Graph of Algorithms says every business is a pipeline of steps, and AI will compress those steps until companies shrink. Clean framing. But it stops one node short of itself.
Miessler points at waste, redundancy, and the easily-automated human jobs in the middle. He treats the executive layer as if it sits outside the graph, doing the optimizing. But the executive layer is part of the graph too.
The thesis only bites on information work
Companies that move atoms — plumbing, surgery, construction, farming, manufacturing — are bottlenecked by robotics, capex, and regulation. Not by intelligence. The graph compresses around the physical work. Routing, dispatch, scheduling, billing, hiring, customer comms collapse into AI. The people touching the world stay. So the real target isn't "companies" in the abstract. It's white-collar coordination.
Everyone names middle management first because it's the fattest layer of pure information shuffling, with the least physical or legal anchor. But the logic doesn't stop there. Team leads doing scheduling and performance tracking are exposed. So is top management doing strategy synthesis, board reporting, M&A analysis, capital allocation. All of it is information work. AI does information work well. If the argument applies to the analyst pulling numbers for a deck, it applies to the executive reading the deck and deciding from it. The shape of the work is the same. The seniority just changes the salary.
The top is a node, not an observer
Once the graph is optimized and the white-collar layers below have been compressed, top management becomes just another node. Slower, more expensive, and more biased than the system underneath it. The reasons to keep humans at the top stop being algorithmic. They become legal accountability, fiduciary ownership, trust signaling to customers, regulators, partners. None of those are about producing better decisions. They are about giving someone to sue, someone to blame, someone to put on a stage.
Strip those away and what remains is the autonomous corporation. Capital, AI, a few physical workers, and a legal shell with a nominal human on top. Everything else is decoration.