Meta’s new AI team has 50 engineers per owner. What could go wrong?

There are flat organizational structures, and then there’s Meta’s newly implemented AI engineering team. The department, which is tasked with promoting the technology giant’s intelligence efforts, will employ a 50-to-1 employee-to-manager ratio. The Wall Street Journaldouble the 25 to 1 ratio that is usually seen as the outer limit of the so-called control scale.

The one-sided management ratio of Facebook’s parents surprised even those well-versed in flat organizations. “It will end in tragedy,” says Andre Spicer, executive director and professor of organizational behavior at Bayes Business School in London.

The idea behind a flat organization, in which managers have a large number of direct reports, is that it makes companies smarter by streamlining the decision-making process and positioning management closer to the front-line employee and customer experience. Cross-functional collaboration that doesn’t get bogged down in hierarchies accelerates innovation. Employees who are close to authority figures are more engaged with a deeper sense of ownership. Or so the theory goes.

Meta is not just about accepting flat structure. Companies are downsizing across the United States, according to a January Gallup report. The average number of reports to managers increased from 10.9 in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. Last year’s numbers show a nearly 50% increase in team size since Gallup first measured it in 2013.

And ultra-flat organizations account for the bulk of the uptake. “The increase in average team size across the U.S. working population over the past year was largely driven by a two percentage point increase in teams of 25 or more employees,” the report says.

Spicer says the business world goes through cycles of tight and “loose” or flat cultures, the latter more popular when the economy is good. The delay would “save costs in the short term,” he says. “You can show a good quarterly report, with quarterly numbers out of it.”

“But then it will cause problems in the medium term,” he says.

Spicer says flat structures work best in “specialized organizations.” For example, software engineering is suitable for filter structures because it runs in collaboration with colleagues and is governed by professional norms. He puts his academic career in the same category.

Still, things can go wrong even in professions that are perfect for flatlining. First, says Spicer, younger or less experienced employees will be overlooked. Second, line managers can completely sink and burn. And third, many people in between will feel the lack of guidance. This will result in “high people or problem cases” requiring limited attention from managers.

In many cases, the natural tendency to organize large teams into smaller groups prevails, and flat teams create temporary hierarchies in the absence of formal teams. (Spicer says research has found that the right size team is seven people per manager, give or take a few.)

Zappos was once the most famous example of a fundamentally flat organization. In fact, the shoe retailer, now owned by Amazon, took things a step further, with a decentralized “halocracy” management structure that eliminated all job titles, managers, and hierarchy. After an ambitious rollout in 2015—CEO Tony Hesse offered buyouts to anyone who wasn’t 100% committed—Zappos eventually backed away from the system and reintroduced managers to focus workers on customers.

It’s possible that AI could ease some of the pain points created by automating job allocation and employee consultation in flat structures that typically fall to middle managers, Spicer says. (Meta did not respond to a request for comment about how its applied AI engineering team will operate.)

Technology has flattened organizations before, but only with a temporary effect. The computerization of the office in the 1980s and 1990s led to a “massive wave of layoffs for middle managers,” says Spicer. But this winner has changed itself as companies have become more sophisticated and seek to serve more stakeholders. The trend continues, he says: “If you look at where we are now, from the 1980s to today, there’s really been an explosion of middle management.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com