It’s 2020, the height of the pandemic. The company sells product management courses. Product managers (P.M.s) have plum jobs within the tech ecosystem: they’re not nerdy like engineers, not airheaded like marketers, not heartless like sales reps. They make six figures. Many people decide now is a good time to become a product manager. Business booms.

A few years later, A.I. can do a lot of product management tasks, and people are starting to get laid off. Demand for courses has decreased. My company starts offering new “A.I. Product Management” certifications that either teach P.M.s to develop A.I. products or to use them. (Nobody knows which.) The CEO says we’re “first movers in the space.” But companies still aren’t hiring product managers, and the new A.I. courses don’t compensate for the lost revenue. No one says it out loud, but we’re on a train speeding toward the edge of a cliff.

I work in marketing, with the airheads. There are eleven of us. My job is to get people who search for product management topics on Google to click on the blog posts I write. During my first year, organic traffic increases, and leadership is happy with my work. But when Google releases A.I. overviews, no one needs my blog posts anymore. Instead, they read the brief summaries at the top of the search results. Traffic tanks.

My company “pivots to enterprise.” Instead of teaching one P.M. at a time, we decide to train entire product teams on A.I. One after another, potential clients say, “No, thank you.” Maybe they’re also making less money, or maybe they don’t need to train workers in A.I. because everyone’s going to be fired very soon. (Nobody knows which.)

The CEO tells me to optimize my blog posts for LLMs because Google is dead. He also says to build A.I. agents, automate my processes, and become a better worker who does more with less because A.I. is here to help us all be more productive. I ask for training so I can learn to build a bot that scrapes Reddit for brand mentions. (The experts claim Reddit posts are like blood in the water for LLM sharks — irresistible.) My manager says there are no resources for training. Not even at a company that sells A.I. trainings, or tries to. (They still haven’t sold any.) Either we are running out of money or they will fire me very soon.

Next, the CEO says he’s going to hire “A.I.-native” workers who are already advanced users of the technology. I figure they’ll know how to make Reddit agents. My manager fires several teammates and assigns their tasks to the new guy. He struggles to keep up with the workload. He keeps making typos in the promo emails, which is weird since he’s writing them with ChatGPT. He never builds the Reddit bot.

Then they bring in another A.I.-native hire, and I know she’s there to replace me and the social media manager. Soon, they throw me from the speeding train. The marketing team of eleven people is down to five. The social media posts never go viral anymore, and they barely publish blog articles. Their emails are peppered with typos. A few months after laying me off, they fire the first A.I.-native, and the second one quits. The team of five is now three. I can see the train from where I stand at the bottom of the abyss as it launches out over the edge of the cliff. It hangs there for a moment before it comes crashing down.