When Robots Start Emailing Other Robots

Imagine this: You lose your job—not because you were underperforming, not because the company went under, not even because of budget cuts. You lose it because Agentic AI decided your position could be automated.

No manager reviewed your work or conducted a performance review. No conversation was had. Just a quiet exchange: one automated system pinging another.

“New AI module online.”

“Task reallocated.”

“Resource no longer required.”

Sound like science fiction? Not so much. The early stages of this are already happening.

The Rise of Machine-to-Machine Workflows

Across industries, businesses are adopting “autonomous workflows.” These are systems where tasks move from one AI process to another without human oversight. Think of an AI program that reads incoming invoices, passes them to another AI for approval, and then forwards payment instructions to a third at the bank or ACH. No people involved. No desks. No salaries.

On the surface, it’s all efficiency and innovation. But take a closer look and you start to see what’s really happening. These weren’t executive tasks. They were the jobs held by managers, specialists and assistants—the backbone of the middle class.

The Disappearing Middle

Automation has been framed as a tool to eliminate “boring” or “repetitive” work. But what’s often overlooked is who holds those jobs. They’re not luxury roles. They’re stable ones. The kind that support families, pay mortgages, and send kids to school.

Now imagine those same positions being replaced—not by a visible robot, but by lines of code behind a dashboard. You don’t see a machine take over. You just stop getting emails. You stop being invited to meetings. You’re slowly excluded from the workflow because the workflow has moved on without you.

No Flash, No Fight—Just Absence

It won’t be a dramatic moment. It won’t be a villain in the boardroom, or some uprising of metal and sparks. Instead, it is taking place as a gradual shift:

• Fewer callbacks after interviews.

• More tasks “assisted” by automation.

• Entire departments thinned out—not by layoffs, by attrition.

And somewhere behind all this, machines are sending updates to other machines.

Status: complete.

Report: submitted.

Human: unnecessary.

Who Gets to Stay?

It’s worth asking who remains in a world like this. If machines can manage the logistics, the communications, even the analysis—what jobs are left for people?

In most cases, only two categories will survive:

1. High-level decision-makers.

2. Low-wage, human-only tasks that aren’t worth automating—yet.

   
   

That means the middle collapses. The roles that required skill but not power, education but not elite credentials—those are the ones being absorbed first. And they’re disappearing quietly, one workflow at a time.

The American Dream in the Age of AI

We used to think the threat of AI would come as a hostile takeover. Instead, it’s arriving as a systems upgrade. No one will announce this change. There will be no headline that says, “The Day the Middle Class Was Lost.”

Instead, the emails will stop coming, logins will fail. And somewhere, in a server room you’ll never see, a robot will thank another robot for taking care of it… because that’s what they were trained by us to do.