Nearly two-thirds of managers report that their responsibilities have increased since 2020. They are expected to lead transformation, manage hybrid teams, absorb constant change and uphold performance, wellbeing and culture. Yet 42% say they now have fewer resources to meet those expectations.
Middle managers are the most stretched and least supported layer in the workforce. The downstream effects include attrition, disengagement, performance decline and these are significant business risks.
Businesses must redesign how to support leadership from the ground up, and AI must be a critical part of the redesign.
The Middle Is the Breaking Point
Middle managers translate strategy into action, mentor teams, manage complexity and mediate ambiguity. And with less time and support than ever before. One study found that employees with unsupported managers are three times more likely to quit within a year.
The result is a systemic leadership bottleneck and a retention nightmare.
Humancore, a digital platform that uses multiplayer AI to deliver real-time personalized support to managers, for example, is aiming to solve the pervasive challenges facing middle managers.
Built by experts in organizational psychology and HR technology, including alumni of companies like LinkedIn and Glint, Humancore’s multiplayer AI advisor adapts to the working styles, goals and personalities of each person involved, empowering managers to act on personalized performance and feedback in real-time.
Personalized Enablement Is the New Baseline
One-off workshops, static toolkits, and generic playbooks often ignore the nuanced reality of modern management. A manager leading a distributed engineering team faces a very different set of relational, strategic and time-bound challenges than one guiding a customer success organization or scaling product operations.
And yet, these managers are routinely offered the same advice at the same cadence regardless of their personality, priorities or team dynamics.
Humancore’s multiplayer AI was built to solve for this complexity. By adapting to the unique behavioral profiles and real-time performance data of each manager and their team, Humancore ensures that guidance that is practical, actionable and aligned with how your people actually work.
When leadership development meets personalization at scale, adoption improves. So does trust. So does retention.
Trust-Built Technology for Human-Centered Work
For innovators such as Humancore, privacy and transparency are not afterthoughts, they’re foundational. Every recommendation is rooted in validated behavioral research, and all data remains private and secure. No data is ever used to train the model, and managers retain full control.
That means you can confidently deploy AI across your manager population without risking trust or compliance. In fact, early customers are seeing measurable boosts in manager confidence, team engagement and decision quality.
Because when AI is done right, it doesn’t surveil. It supports.
From More Work to Better Work
The question for today’s C-suite leaders isn’t “How do I make my managers do more?” It’s “How do I help them make better decisions, faster?”
Humancore was designed to expand capacity, not just efficiency. It helps reduce decision friction, create space for meaningful coaching, and elevate clarity during high-pressure moments.
Smarter infrastructure that adapts to each team’s evolving reality is how leadership excellence becomes scalable.
Rebuilding for the Humans in the Middle
Manager burnout is not a failure of grit. It’s a failure of design.
Leadership support is a core capability. Humancore is a leader in bridging the gap by delivering stronger teams, faster execution and healthier organizations.
