Let’s get this right out of the way: I was laid off on April 30. I’d worked for the PR department of a large, multi-functional media agency for just shy of four years, as a dedicated in-house writer – an atypical role for a PR firm. The layoffs hit multiple departments, from the most junior level in the biz all the way up to at least the VP level. When I tell people this, the first question they ask is usually: Was this a surprise to you? 

To which I say: A surprise, but not a shock. I’m a Professional Content Person, have been since high school, and media pros (editorial, PR, marketing, comms, advertising, adtech, martech, media buying, etc.) are always vulnerable in a down economy, because media is usually downstream from the real money source. If you’ve lived and worked through a few economic slumps, you learn how to spot some common warning signs. 

The second question people usually ask is: Did AI have anything to do with the layoffs?

To which I say: Dunno! I don’t have enough knowledge of how decisions were made at the highest level of the business. I don’t know what decisions they’re planning to make through the rest of the year. I can’t possibly say whether or how their AI implementation strategy impacted HR strategy, which is kinda what you’re asking here.

But I understand where this question is pointing. We’ve heard variations on the phrase “AI will take creative jobs” for years now, and you’re asking whether my experience bears out that prediction. Whether entire job roles are being x’ed out and replaced by agents and LLMs. 

That question is much bigger than me and my former employer. Fortunately, I live in New York, and I’m involved in local music (etc.), where, not shockingly, you find a lot of people who also work in media. And media people love talking shop with other media people. Even in a sunny economy, there’s a lot of turnover in this biz, and people help each other out. You can bet that it’ll come back around someday. 

Completely anecdotally, using a methodology involving social chatter about lived experience and grapevine intel gathered at cookouts and rock shows this summer, I haven’t met or verified a single New York media person who can say their job was rendered redundant by AI. But I am hearing a lot of people say they believe they’re competing against AI for who gets the investment.

Licensing AI tech costs money. Building custom AI tech in-house costs money. Businesses are  making those investments, and they’re doing it in a down economy.  Budgets are finite. It’s rational enough to presume that increasing investment in AI will divert investment away from other parts of the business, including staffing. Regardless of whether we have the stats to support that presumption, this is a common interpretation among media people I talk to. 

Back to the thing about AI taking the tasks part of people’s jobs. I can say that in my own experience, after the company I worked for really started leaning into AI, my own workload increased rather than decreased. That’s because a significant part of my job became unfucking the AI outputs. 

Don’t get me wrong, that’s not sour grapes, that’s not an indictment of the tech the company was using, and it’s not unique to my experience. Gen AI has made it really easy to produce content that is still totally factually unverified, unethical to share externally, and a legal compliance risk in general. Even when the output seems basically on point, it’s still kinda fucked, and someone has to unfuck it. AI has made it easy for early-career people and generalists to turn out first drafts of deliverables, and businesses are encouraging them to do just that. AI has made it easy for time-strapped execs to take a rough concept and quickly expand on it. But a specialist needs to step in and verify factual claims, add context, make sure citations are relevant, remove points that are old news or old hat to the audience, rewrite the takeaways to better align with the business’s goals, and clean up anything else that needs cleanup.

Oh, and effectively unfucking the outputs involves a lot of internal discussion and collaboration, too. It’s best to start with the cleanest possible abstract or objective, so you need to get aligned with everyone who has a hand in the earliest stages of a creative project. Now you’re brainstorming, you’re identifying what you’re going to need to get the project over and you’re gathering those things sooner rather than later, you’re coming up with new ideas to throw in the can for later. 

That’s what happened with my job. When you work at an agency, you have to log your hours, so they can be billed to the appropriate client or project. Two years ago, I hardly ever logged hours for “internal” anything. I was responsible for my deliverables, and when things were going smoothly, there wasn’t a whole lot to discuss. In 2026, I was logging internal comms on the regular. Where my role used to be largely reactive, it quickly became at least as proactive, if not more.

And this is consistent with “the promise of AI,” as so many media and tech pros have called it. If you’re in the biz, you recognize these lines: 

AI will free creative professionals to think more strategically – to be brought into projects from the earliest stages and help shape the direction they take, or to find applications for their skills in different areas of the business – but it’ll be brutal for early-career people. As a fortune cookie told me back when I was 21, “The work will teach you how to do it.” Raw skills become specialist expertise through repetition, variation, and continued learning. And it’s really hard to either get ahead or prove your role’s value when you’re grinding on relatively uncomplicated tasks, or just, y’know… not getting hired.* 

From people at businesses large or small, you hear a combination of confidence in the value of one’s human skills, and pessimism over the possibility that management will give a shit. Everyone I’ve spoken with believes AI can’t possibly do their entire jobs. Some say AI has slightly reduced the amount of time they need to spend on a creative project. Some say their company or team is still figuring out how to use it beyond the most obvious and simplest repetitive tasks. And there is great concern almost across the board that the higher-ups will slash headcount prematurely, before any new AI systems are properly tested and proven to do what they’re supposed to do, and it’ll create more problems for anyone remaining. 

That sentiment is all over the Agency Lyfe memes this summer. I’m talking about memes commenting on real things that are really happening at real agencies and brands. I mean, the @digitalchadvertising Instagram page has the pitchforks and torches out over AI-happy execs who don’t understand what their employees’ real work looks like, and/or over agency layoffs announced with the dodgiest of explanations. Out here irl, one person told me his company invested in AI and cut creative staff, and now they need to outsource creative work to a freelancer. Likewise, I’m seeing a whole lot of freelance gig postings looking for people to “humanize” AI outputs. Y’know, unfucking. “Humanizing” is a funny way of phrasing it, because it suggests you can just sort of feel your way to a workable draft. I’m seeing a lot of lowball offers. Guess we’ll see what kind of expertise they can get for lower-than-industry-standard rates. Anyone taking these gigs? What’s your experience been like? Was that an invite to hit the comments? Sure, hit the comments.

Well, Content People have always been entirely aware their value in the workplace doesn’t lie in volume, even though the bean-counters in upper management historically have struggled to understand what else their value could be. I’m interested in seeing what happens after AI providers raise their licensing fees, and after the throw-everything-against-the-wall urge subsides. And I’m willing to be surprised by what form our value takes in the next couple years.

* I’m putting this down as a footnote, because this is where I’m going into “LinkedIn Post” territory, and stuff in that zone can end up sounding really cheesy or thirsty. But. I actually think AI can accelerate early-career training, if the business creates space for it. The training doesn’t come from using the AI tools, but from watching and understanding how specialists review and revise gen AI content. Gatekeeping specialized knowledge does no one any favors. If I’m not illuminating what I’m doing for the other people I’m working with, I’m withholding value from the team. The pace of content production can be matched by the pace of education, if you make the right choices and are able to follow through on them. Anyway, I also believe pretty firmly that resistance to change is usually a symptom of a failure of imagination. I started out at a legacy print publication while it was in the process of digitizing in the ‘00s; AMA.