// but I'd bet your CTO is looking to shake-up the domain of staff developers more than management with the AI hype train.

Well that's a given, isn't it?

The contemporary CTO is looking for quantitative proof of productivity increases via Agentic AI adoption based on things like delivery cadence or SLAs. Management is a qualitative function, and guaranteed to be skilled in 'mapping' their role to the delivery of value and reporting such things upward anyway.

Engineering Management are there to make firm commitments and reasonable compromises around the ability to deliver features generally already committed to hard dates by either Sales or by virtue of external market forces. How this is achieved using social and political capital alongside Domain Knowledge is the distinguishing factor between an IC and a Technical Manager imo.