Airbnb CEO says pure people managers have no future

Brian Chesky does not deal in euphemism. The Airbnb co-founder and chief executive, speaking on the Invest Like the Best podcast earlier this month, identified two categories of worker he believes will not survive the transition to an AI-enabled workplace: people who refuse to adapt, and people managers whose entire contribution is managing people.

"I do not think people managers will have any value in the future," Chesky said. "When I mean people managers, I mean people that only manage people. You cannot just be these managers where you are people's therapists, and you are just doing meetings, you are doing one-on-ones."

For HR leaders in Singapore, the remarks landed in a specific and somewhat uncomfortable context. Singapore's business leadership is among the most AI-confident in the Asia-Pacific region. Its frontline workforce is among the least AI-ready. The gap between those two positions is where the management layer lives - and where Chesky is pointing.

What Chesky actually said - and what he did not

The full context matters because the headline version - "people managers are finished" - is both accurate and incomplete.

Chesky's preferred model is what he calls a "hybrid people manager" or "manager IC" - an individual contributor who also leads people, and whose authority derives from expertise and proximity to the work. His example was Jony Ive: a leader whose influence came from deep engagement with the product, not from a position in an org chart.

He pointed to Airbnb itself as a live example. Design and engineering leaders are "going back to coding or using Claude Code," Anthropic's AI coding assistant. AI now generates nearly 60 per cent of Airbnb's code. The managers thriving, Chesky said, are those in the work - not those supervising it from a distance.

He was careful to distinguish between the role losing value and the person becoming redundant. "The companies that are prepared to change and transform are the companies that are going to benefit from AI. And if you do not change, you are going to be disrupted."

The Singapore data makes this urgent

Chesky's challenge maps onto a measurement problem in Singapore that HR has not yet fully resolved.

HRD Asia has reported that 80 per cent of business leaders in Singapore are highly familiar with AI agents - but only 41 per cent of employees share that familiarity. The 39-point gap between what leaders understand and what their teams are experiencing is not primarily a technology problem. It is a management problem. The managers who should be closing that gap - modelling AI use, setting expectations, translating strategy into daily practice - are caught between leaders who assume readiness and workers who do not have it.

HRD's analysis of Singapore AI proficiency found that 97 per cent of the workforce are using AI poorly or not at all by the standard of genuine value creation. Only 2.7 per cent qualify as genuine AI practitioners. Employees whose managers expect daily AI use are 2.6 times more proficient than those whose managers discourage it. That single statistic defines the manager's role in the AI transition more precisely than any job description rewrite: the manager is the most powerful variable in whether the workforce actually adopts AI or merely tolerates it.

This is not the model Chesky is attacking. He is attacking managers who only manage - who run the one-on-ones and the status meetings without contributing to the work. Singapore's challenge is somewhat different: it has managers who are not yet equipped to lead the AI transition their organisations need. The solution is the same one Chesky describes - managers need to get into the work - but the path is development, not elimination.

Singapore's tripartite lens on the manager question

Singapore's approach to workforce transformation has always been shaped by its tripartite model - employers, unions and government working together on transition rather than imposing it. That context makes the Silicon Valley "just flatten the org chart" approach feel like a poor fit, even when the underlying analysis is correct.

Singapore's PM pledged a "people-first approach" as the country embraces AI, and the government has backed that pledge with the government's investment of more than S$1 billion in AI research and plans to upskill 40,000 tech workers. The frame is capability-led, not hierarchy-reduction-led. HR leaders in Singapore who align their management development programmes with that national direction - building the player-coach model through structured capability investment - are working with the current. Those who simply reduce management layers in response to a podcast are working against it.

Research from NTUC LearningHub found that 54 per cent of Singapore professionals strongly agree coaching is a skill every business leader should have - but the same report identified a significant lack of initiative in actually practising it. That gap is the player-coach model's biggest obstacle in Singapore: the recognition of what good management looks like is high; the execution of it is low. Chesky's challenge is valid. The response to it needs to be a development investment, not an organisational restructure.

The thing Chesky is not saying

There is a dimension of this debate that Silicon Valley's CEO chorus consistently omits, and it is particularly relevant in Singapore.

Research cited by HRD Asia found that only 8 per cent of Singaporean employees are comfortable with an AI agent managing them, and just 24 per cent are comfortable with AI operating in the background without human knowledge. The human manager is not merely a coordination overhead in Singapore workplaces - they are the trusted interface through which employees accept organisational change. Remove them without replacing the trust function, and the AI adoption that Chesky is calling for becomes harder, not easier, to achieve.

Singapore's HR teams are being positioned as the function that will make AI work - not just deploy it. That is the right frame. And it means HR leaders need to respond to Chesky not by restructuring management layers but by redesigning the management role: moving it from coordination and oversight toward coaching, technical contribution and the human connection that neither AI agents nor org chart changes can provide.

The meeting manager is not over. The meeting-only manager is. That distinction is the work.