Brian Chesky said the age of AI will not leave room for pure people managers, warning that workers who only supervise others or refuse to adapt will be pushed aside. The Airbnb chief said those jobs will only survive if managers stay close to the work itself, not just the meetings around it.
Brian Chesky on AI managers
“The two types of people who will not make the shift to AI are pure people managers, and people that [sic] are rigid and don’t want to change and evolve,” Chesky said on the Invest Like The Best podcast. He added, “I don’t think people managers will have any value in the future. When I mean people managers, [I mean] people that only manage people.”
That is a direct challenge to a common corporate ladder: he is saying the next layer of leadership has to understand the work, not just the people doing it. Chesky said people managers will need to become hybrid people managers or manager ICs to succeed, with managers involved in the context of the work if they want to keep their jobs.
Jony Ive and the hybrid role
Chesky pointed to former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive as an example of the balance he wants to see, pairing product design with team leadership. He also said, “You can’t just be these managers where you’re people’s therapists, and you’re just doing meetings, you’re doing one-on-ones.”
The friction in his warning is that the role he is describing still exists today at many companies, but he is saying it loses value when AI changes how work gets done. Chesky’s standard is narrower and more operational: a manager must be tied to output, not only personnel.
Airbnb, $84.4 billion, and AI
$84.4 billion is the scale Chesky used to describe Airbnb as a short-term rental company, and he said AI has already been instrumental to that business. Earlier this year, he told CNBC, “From a business standpoint, I think AI is the best thing that ever happened to Airbnb,” and added, “And if you don’t change, you’re going to be disrupted.”
50% of entry-level white-collar work is the broader warning Chesky referenced alongside other tech leaders’ concerns about AI’s labor impact, and he said founders and companies prepared to change and transform will benefit. For managers, the practical takeaway is blunt: stay connected to the work, or the title alone will not protect you.
12 to 18 months is the window Chesky has used elsewhere when talking about AI change, and that timeline leaves little room for slow adaptation. The workers most exposed in his view are the ones whose jobs depend on supervision without technical context, because he is drawing a line between management as oversight and management as active participation in the work.
