As a feature to reduce micromanagement in late game when you have dozens of large cities, we could have city governors. That would be not just CMA that is sometimes suboptimal and is very CPU consumptive, and does not have any game-defined bonuses over manual setting - so still one wins by spending more time in the game, not just making smart decisions in a limited time. To make a server-side bonus that won't burn the circuits, we for example could introduce a governor that for some payment (large but it costs that for a big city) will redistribute the workforce for gathering each output to the tiles of maximal profit in that output. To limit the profits that can be thus ENORMOUS, we can put bits on the tiles if they have been processed this turn (at least by the same player to avoid certain complications). We can place cities in a player-defined priority queue to decide who gets the best tiles. The governor may be a unit on a special activity that can be captured and reused by enemies.
Later, if we have really GREAT number of cities, we can join them into provinces (e.g.: load governor unitss of several cities into the governor unit of the province capital) and unite their workforce, so we can use single production plan with items like "Guerilla in Torgau". There can be some difference in effectiveness of the distribution related to how well are province cities connected to province capital, or we can just imitate that with corruption effects.