Job titles are losing their meaning at work. In some AI labs, most employees share the same generic title, such as "member of technical staff." Other companies have eliminated vice president and senior vice president roles entirely. For a century, your title and the number of people reporting to you told you who held power. AI is weakening both signals at once, and the org chart no longer works as a map of influence.

The shift is measurable. Gartner predicts that by the end of the year, one in five organizations will use AI to flatten their structure and eliminate more than half of current middle-management positions. Gallup found the average manager oversaw 12.1 direct reports in 2025, up from 8.2 in 2013. Uber cut about 10% of its workforce in September and said it had reduced the number of employees sitting seven or more layers below the CEO by 20%.

Workers who want to know where they stand, or what a new role may offer, need to ask a simple question about their jobs: Who decides? That question sits at the center of Power On New Terms, a framework developed through dozens of interviews with senior leaders. Positional power is the title, the seat and the number of people reporting to you. Structural power is the authority to set the terms of your own work, whatever your title says.

Structural power rests on six REVISE terms: Risk, Evaluation, Visibility, Intensity, Scope and Exit. Leaders revise these terms gradually, often before they have a name for what they are doing. When an employer will not make room for the new terms, that is when they take them somewhere else.

Risk: Who Absorbs the Loss

Risk is what you are exposed to when an arrangement ends: your income, your health coverage, your reputation and the cost of rebuilding. AI is driving up that last cost fastest. Of the 6.1 million U.S. workers with the highest AI exposure and the least capacity to adapt, more than eight in 10 are women, according to the Brookings Institution. Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant put it bluntly in the Wall Street Journal: "The expertise you have today may be obsolete tomorrow."

Cate Luzio spent two decades running multibillion-dollar businesses at HSBC and JPMorgan, then left to fund Luminary, a membership platform for professional women, with her own money. Self-funding put the downside on her and kept investors from setting the company's terms. Luminary now has 15,000 members.

Ask yourself: How much of my income, coverage and reputation depends on this one employer, and who decided that?

Evaluation: Who Defines Good Work

Evaluation covers who judges your work, by what measure and on what cycle. AI is changing all three, often without telling the people being judged. More than two dozen Meta employees sued the company over roughly 8,000 separations, alleging the selections relied on AI-aided metrics. In Charter, Brian Elliott described a product designer who showed her manager that a prototype took one hour in Figma and 15 hours with an AI tool. The manager replied, "We don't care. Build them all as AI prototypes."

Sarah Creal, founder and CEO of Sarah Creal Beauty, knows what an unwritten measure costs. At Estée Lauder she took on double the workload without the promotion. At Victoria Beckham Beauty she hit every target in her contract, and investors still moved to push her out. She now chooses who sits at her table.

Ask yourself: Who wrote the definition of good work in my role this year, and have I seen it?

Visibility: Who Gets the Credit

Visibility comes down to who sees your work, who gets credit for it and who is in the room when it is discussed. Titles used to do much of that signaling for you. Women start behind on AI work: at entry level, 21% of women say a manager has encouraged them to use AI, compared with 33% of men, LeanIn.Org found.

As titles lose their signaling power, the record of your work has to live somewhere your employer does not control. Neha Ruch, founder of the Power Pause, built her newsletter on infrastructure she owns. "The whole reason to have a newsletter was to have your own real estate," she says.

Ask yourself: If my title vanished tomorrow, who outside my reporting line could explain what I have built?

Intensity: Who Claims Your Time

Intensity is the claim the work makes on your life: the hours, how fast you are expected to respond, where you have to be and whether recovery is built in. AI has shortened the interval between a request and the expected answer, and the strain shows. Workers experiencing what Boston Consulting Group calls "AI brain fry" are 39% more likely to want to quit, according to research Elliott cited. One chief people officer told him, "Our top performers are trying to outrace irrelevance."

Channing Martin, the former chief diversity and social impact officer at IPG, lost her job and all but one member of her team after Omnicom acquired the company. As she builds an independent advisory practice, she is rejecting the "go-go-go" career blueprint her generation inherited.

Ask yourself: What does this job expect of my evenings, my location and my response time, and when did I agree to it?

Scope: Who Draws the Lines

Scope defines what you own, how much of it and whose problems count as yours. AI redraws those lines constantly, and few employers are updating the map. Only 33% of companies say they are reworking career paths in response to AI, according to Deloitte.

Paige Thomas, now CEO of Rent the Runway, has turned down jobs whose scope was limited or that she did not completely control. Earlier in her career, she declined a division president role at Signet because it had been stripped of marketing. She held out for a role that matched what she knew she could run.

Ask yourself: What do I own outright today, and what has landed on my plate without anyone asking?

Exit: Who Controls the Timing

Exit is how you leave, what leaving costs and who controls the timing. AI has handed more of that timing to employers. U.S. companies announced 397,755 job cuts in the first five months of 2026, and AI was the leading reason for several of those months, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Generic titles add another cost, because "member of technical staff" carries no portable marker of seniority into your next negotiation.

Toni Ronayne won a C-suite job after an interview process that drew 500 candidates, then turned it down. She runs the C Society, a fractional executive model she designed herself.

Ask yourself: If I had to leave in 90 days, what would it cost me, and what can I negotiate now so the timing is mine?

The terms that determine how much power and purpose a role gives you rarely make it onto the negotiating table. Titles used to stand in for them, and AI is taking those off the table too. The workers who lead the companies of the future will be the ones who intentionally put the terms back on, and ask who decides before AI decides for them.