“The Great Flattening” is Crushing Your Managers – Visier Manager Agent is Here to Help
Your managers, accidental or not, are feeling the squeeze from “The Great Flattening” – and they are drowning in a sea of disconnected data. Discover how Visier Manager Agent acts as their dedicated assistant, using the power of context to guide them from crisis to high-performance management, improving an organization’s ability to achieve its goals.
The signs are everywhere. A top performer resigns out of the blue. A critical project veers off track. Team morale is low, but no one can quite articulate why. You might blame the individuals, but the real issue is likely hiding in plain sight: your managers are at a breaking point.
And it’s not their fault.
We’re in the midst of “The Great Flattening.” It’s a seismic shift in organizational design, and it’s happening fast. In a push for efficiency, epitomized by Meta’s 2023 "Year of Efficiency" and Amazon's significant increase in worker-to-supervisor ratios, companies are stripping out layers of middle management. In fact, 44% of US companies have already reduced managerial roles.
The intention is to become leaner and more agile. The reality can be like creating a house of cards, with potential unintended consequences. The managers who remain are inheriting larger teams, broader responsibilities, and a crushing administrative load. And they matter so much, directly influencing 70% of business outcomes according to Gallup. Without reinforcement—without giving them the tools they need—we're asking them to bear an impossible load. It's no wonder that over half of them (53%) are showing cracks from the strain, reporting burnout.
At Visier, we’ve identified three critical capabilities that are failing under this pressure:
Strategic alignment breaks down: Teams end up working hard on the wrong things, wasting energy and resources.
Performance suffers: Valuable insights about what behaviors drive business impact get lost. The data is there, but it remains trapped in fragmented systems like Jira, Salesforce, or your customer support platform. Time-starved managers just stop coaching and without oversight, employees stop improving and start following their own compass, or some random, inconsistent praise from a leader who parachuted into their work.
Talent optimization fails silently: Your best people disengage silently and leave before anyone even realizes they’re a flight risk. Without the time for meaningful check-ins and development conversations, managers lose touch with their team’s ambitions and frustrations.
As companies everywhere rush to embed AI within their orgs, a critical flaw is emerging: most of these tools lack genuine context. They are powerful, but organizationally untethered from the overall view of what’s really going on. This is precisely where Visier is uniquely positioned to lead and why we are so passionate about building solutions to vastly improve manager effectiveness. For over fifteen years, our core mission has been to do the hard work of unifying disparate, complex data from across the enterprise into a coherent Workforce Intelligence layer. While other solutions attempt to infer context from messy communication streams, our foundation is your organization’s core structure – who does what, how teams work together, and what goals they are driving for. This is the crucial difference that allows us to build an agent that doesn’t just answer questions, but anticipates needs with a deep, relevant understanding that generic AI simply cannot replicate.
This isn’t just a manager problem. It’s a direct threat to business performance. When managers underperform, teams underperform and when teams underperform, your business suffers. For too long, support has taken the form of a generic leadership training course—support that takes them out of their flow of work, arrives too late, too early, or is completely divorced from the manager’s actual moment of need. HRBPs can help in a crisis, but are also stretched too thin. Data and analytics are awesome if only the manager had time to engage and know what to do with the insights. This is especially ineffective when you consider that 82% of managers are "accidental," promoted for their individual contributor skills without formal preparation.
We asked our customers, our most trusted partners, what we can do to help managers. Here’s what they said:
They don’t need another dashboard. They need a personalized assistant proactively guiding them so they can manage their people.
That’s why we built Visier Manager Agent.
Announced today at HRTech Conference 2025, Manager Agent is a new category of Workforce Intelligence. It’s an AI-powered companion that works tirelessly alongside every single manager in your business. It scales best practices that drive business results, embeds strategic insights directly into their daily workflow, automating the busywork so they can focus on the human work.
As our Chief Product Officer, Keith Bigelow, said, "The role of the people manager has reached a breaking point. To succeed, they don’t need another dashboard or a generic training module, they need the right intelligence right at their fingertips."
Here’s how Manager Agent gives them that intelligence:
It transforms operational noise into actionable insight: The agent connects to the systems where work actually happens—customer interactions, project updates, quality metrics—and compares that raw data against behavioural competencies into a clear picture of personal performance. It answers the question, “Who is exhibiting the behavior that we know leads to business outcomes?” without the manager needing to spend hours looking for the needle in the haystack.
It aligns every team to the mission: Manager Agent helps you write goals, which is table stakes now with AI, but it also automatically scores them for how they align to high-level company objectives. It forms a dynamic feedback loop to ensure organizational agility so that when any goals or objectives change, goal authors are alerted on how to realign to the new direction. By tracking progress in real-time, it provides constant visibility into how the team's daily efforts are driving the company’s strategic priorities.
It prompts the conversations that matter: This is where we solve the “silent manager” problem. The Agent automates the prep for 1:1 meetings with data-driven talking points. It drafts performance reviews based on actual goal attainment. It even identifies a top performer who may be a retention risk and proactively books a “stay conversation” on the manager’s calendar, complete with expert-informed guidance. It gives your manager not just the insight, but the confidence and the words to act on it.
This isn’t about replacing managers; it’s about augmenting them, unlocking a level of performance that was previously unattainable. The data proves the potential. Research shows organizations with strong performance feedback cultures can double their net profit margin. By improving goal alignment and ensuring continuous, impactful feedback, we project that Manager Agent can drive performance boosts of 16% to 26%.
What if we could give every manager superhuman capability BEFORE asking them to do more? Visier Manager Agent amplifies managerial excellence, making it possible for organizations to thoughtfully evolve their structures. When managers are truly empowered with AI-augmented intelligence, teams can grow dynamically and organically, but through confident capability expansion.
The era of the overwhelmed, unsupported manager has to end. And not just for teams themselves, but for businesses as a whole that must achieve greater results with less. With Visier Manager Agent, we’re turning a moment of crisis into an opportunity for excellence, empowering leaders to build the high-performance teams that will define the future of work.
Visier’s Manager Agent will be available in early 2026. If you’re at HRTech Conference 2025, come see it for yourself at our booth (#5209). You can also learn more at visier.com/products/manager-agent.
