[JED3]

This is maybe more of a semantic disagreement, but I would expect the frontline manager, not middle management, to be the first in management to shrink in population on account of AI. If software and AI is to be made more responsible for managing the hourly worker, then naturally your frontline manager should be capable of managing more humans at once, thereby reducing the company's need for frontline managers. As a result, managers can be made responsible for more people at once, teams can be larger, and fewer frontline managers being needed.

However, claiming that management will be affected "before" the hourly employee is an invalid prediction in today's age. The hourly employee has already been disproportionately affected by AI, some even made obsolete by robots or automation. Retail (especially brick & mortar) has already seen many of those jobs be replaced by much less sophisticated advancements (ecommerce, d2c, etc), arguing to the contrary would be impossible to back up at this point.