In five to ten years, businesses may be managed by autonomous agents rather than humans. The article argues that middle management, often serving as a coordination and "routing protocol," is a bottleneck due to human biological limitations like latency and cognitive biases. This layer, currently compensated by team-building and coaching, is ripe for a software-native approach.

Algorithmic trading and e-commerce platforms already utilize autonomous, revenue-generating loops. As reasoning models mature and tool-use protocols stabilize, companies will likely grant agents autonomous budget authority, transforming them from cost centers into revenue-generating business units. This shift will compress middle management into mechanism design within a "decentralized swarm of specialized agents."

Instead of weekly syncs and roadmaps, agents will programmatically bid for capital based on probabilistic returns, operating at the speed of RPC. This structural change means the corporation of the mid-2030s may not have a middle management layer at all, as it will exist as protocol, not personnel. The primary challenge is not intelligence but liability, necessitating an "Execution Governance Layer" to enforce deterministic, runtime policies and prevent illegal actions.