The manager is the implementation. AI adoption depends on it.

Somewhere in your organisation there's a capable person quietly running the numbers on whether the role is still worth it. They tend to be a manager. And according to Gallup's 2026 "State of the Global Workplace" report (yes, the sort of thing I read of an evening), there are more of them doing that sum than there used to be.

Global manager engagement sat at 22% in 2025, down nine points from 2022. For years the job carried an "engagement premium": more autonomy, more connection to outcomes, and measurably more engagement than the teams they led. That premium has quietly evaporated. Gallup calls it the "shrinking perk of being a manager", which is the diplomatic way of saying the role got harder while the support for it did not keep pace.

Here's the part that should give anyone leading transformation pause. At the precise moment managers are checking out, they've become the single biggest variable in whether your AI investment returns anything. Employees whose managers actively champion AI use are nearly nine times more likely to say the technology has genuinely changed how work gets done. Fewer than a third say their manager offers that kind of support… so the maths is not flattering.

We tend to talk about AI readiness as a tooling question, or a model question. On the ground, it generally comes down to whether the person a rung or two up the structure is bought in… and resourced enough to lead. The manager is the implementation.

The hopeful bit is that this reads as a design problem more than an inevitability. Flattening structures, widening spans of control, thinner resourcing, and the cumulative weight of every workforce shift since 2020 (remote work, return-to-office, cost-of-living, now AI) have all landed on the same role without commensurate backing. Yet in best-practice organisations, 79% of managers are engaged, nearly four times the global average. That gap is a choice your operating model is making, whether or not anyone set out to make it.

So before you appoint another sponsor or commission another comms plan, it's worth asking a sharper question about the managers you already have. If you want to do that thinking properly before you take it to your team, Pragma is built for exactly this kind of problem, and the FAQ answers the practical questions about how it works.

Mark tells the story behind the data, including the three weeks away that taught him what good management actually feels like, in the full article.