What Managers Run Out Of

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 09:00:00 -0600

The pitch keeps showing up wearing different clothes. Automate enough of the coordination work and one manager can effectively run twenty teams instead of five. Agents don’t need one-on-ones, don’t burn out, don’t need a Friday afternoon to recover. Widen the span, remove a layer of management, and the org chart gets flatter and cheaper at the same time.

Igor Rikalo, president and COO of supply-chain software vendor o9 Solutions, put a number on where this goes in a July 2026 Forbes piece. Within five years, he expects a strong product manager to be coordinating something like 180 agents, and a head of supply chain something like 300, running forecasts, negotiating contracts, testing scenarios, and flagging risks in real time. That’s one vendor executive’s forward projection, not a measured outcome anywhere yet, and it names the assumption plainly. Swap the direct report for an agent, and span of control turns into mostly a capacity problem where adding compute means supervising more work.

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What Managers Run Out Of