When desktop publishing arrived in the late 1980s, entire departments existed around a single production chain. Paste-up artists arranged layouts by hand. Typographers set type as a dedicated craft. Color separators prepared printing plates. Darkroom technicians processed film. Each person was excellent at one narrow piece of the process and handed off to the next. Within a decade, a single graphic designer with a Mac could own the entire workflow. The roles did not disappear. They collapsed into one person with broader ownership and a higher compensation ceiling, because their value had multiplied. The specialists who thrived were not the ones who defended their lane. They were the ones who picked up the full lifecycle and ran with it. The ones who waited for the industry to come back to them did not make it.

That is what is happening now across every function, all at once, and most companies have not figured out what it actually means for how they hire and structure their teams.

AI was cited as a factor in over 55,000 U.S. layoffs in 2025 CNBC, and the pace is accelerating into 2026. But the default narrative that AI is simply replacing people misses the more important shift. Research from Harvard Business Review found that companies have been laying off employees because of AI's potential rather than its current performance. Salesforce Ben These are not efficiency cuts. They are structural bets. Companies are going lean now so that when their AI investments start compounding, the org is built to absorb them. Only 14% of CFOs say they have seen a clear, measurable return on their AI investments so far. CFO.com They are spending more, seeing less than expected, and restructuring anyway. Because the real move is not about today. It is about building a team that can actually operate in what comes next. And that means every role that survived is being asked to own something fundamentally different than what it owned before.

The modern product team was built around the handoff. A PM owned the roadmap and wrote the specs. An engineer owned the build. A designer owned the experience. Each person was excellent at their lane and the work moved through them sequentially. This model made sense when the scope of each discipline was genuinely too wide for one person to hold.

AI is changing that math.

What the roles are today:

• A Software Engineer who owns implementation within a defined technical scope

• A Product Manager who translates business needs into requirements and coordinates across functions

• A Product Designer who owns the visual and interaction layer and relies on engineering to execute it

What the roles are becoming:

• People who own a surface area, not a function. Someone who can move from identifying a problem to designing a solution to shipping it without losing momentum at every handoff

• Contributors who use AI to cover the gaps across disciplines rather than waiting for the right specialist to pick it up

• Fewer people with broader ownership, where the expectation is not that you do everything perfectly but that you can hold the full lifecycle of a problem and know when to go deeper

This is not about shrinking teams for the sake of cost. It is about recognizing that deep specialization in narrow lanes was always a workaround for tooling limitations. When one person can now move fluidly across design, scoping, and implementation with AI filling the gaps, the fragmented team structure becomes a liability, not an asset. Handoffs slow things down. Silos create misalignment. Waiting for the right person to pick something up kills momentum.

The teams winning right now are the ones where each person's scope of ownership is growing, and their compensation and title are reflecting that reality. That is not a reduction in value. It is an elevation of it. The same way a graphic designer in 1992 who mastered desktop publishing did not become less valuable than the five specialists they replaced. They became significantly more valuable because they could hold more of the outcome.

The traditional go-to-market team was built around clear handoffs and defined lanes. A Product Marketing Manager owned positioning, messaging, and launch. A Business Development lead owned partnerships, pipeline, and relationship cultivation. An Account Executive owned the close. Each motion had a dedicated owner and the machine scaled by adding people to each layer.

AI is collapsing the distance between those lanes.

What the roles are today:

• A Product Marketing Manager who owns messaging and positioning, produces launch materials, and hands off to sales with enablement assets

• A Business Development Manager who sources and qualifies partnership opportunities, manages relationship pipelines, and passes warm deals to an AE to close

• An Account Executive who receives qualified pipeline, runs a defined sales process, and closes within their assigned territory or segment

What the roles are becoming:

• A product marketer who owns the full narrative of a product, from positioning and competitive intelligence to customer-facing content to influencing how the product gets built, not just how it gets sold

• A BD operator who can identify a partnership opportunity, build the relationship, structure the deal, and see it through to revenue without a clean handoff to someone else

• An account owner who prospects within a defined market, closes business, and retains and expands the relationship over time, using AI to handle the research, outreach cadences, and reporting that used to require a supporting cast

The volume game is over. One person with strong instincts and the right AI tooling can own more of the customer journey than an entire segmented team could eighteen months ago. The hire that matters now is not the person who can execute one motion exceptionally well. It is the person who understands the full arc from awareness to close to expansion and can hold more of it than their job title used to suggest was possible.

Operations and HR were built around a simple premise: as the company grows, the volume of coordination, administration, and process management grows with it. More employees means more onboarding. More vendors means more contracts. More complexity means more people to manage it. Headcount in these functions was essentially a derivative of headcount everywhere else.

That relationship is breaking down.

What the roles are today:

• An HR Generalist who manages onboarding, compliance, benefits administration, and employee relations

• An Operations Manager who owns process documentation, vendor management, and cross-functional coordination

• A Recruiter who sources candidates, manages pipelines, and coordinates interviews across open roles

What the roles are becoming:

• A people strategist who uses AI to handle the administrative layer and spends their time on organizational design, culture, and talent judgment at a level that directly influences how the company is built

• An operations lead who architects systems and workflows rather than managing them, using AI to automate the coordination layer so human attention is reserved for decisions that require real context and judgment

• A talent partner who understands how AI is changing every function they hire for, redesigns roles in real time, and challenges hiring managers on what they actually need versus what they are used to asking for

IBM laid off around 8,000 employees from its HR department, replacing those functions with an internal AI tool, then began hiring software engineers and data analysts instead. FinalRoundAI The signal is clear. Transactional work in operations and people is being automated. What remains is more strategic, higher stakes, and requires a fundamentally different skill profile than the roles that came before. The people who will thrive here are not the ones who were best at managing the process. They are the ones who were always asking why the process existed and whether it could be better.

Here is the part of this conversation nobody wants to have openly. Not everyone currently in these roles is going to make the transition. That is not a judgment. It is just true. The paste-up artist who had spent fifteen years perfecting a physical craft was not a lesser person than the designer who picked up Photoshop in six months. They were just optimized for a world that was moving on. Some of them adapted. Some did not. And the ones who waited to see if the industry would stabilize before committing to the new way of working almost uniformly lost the window.

The same dynamic is playing out right now, and the window is moving faster than most people realize.

If you are an individual contributor in any of the functions above, the single most important thing you can do today is start tinkering outside your lane. Not to become a generalist in the abstract sense, but to build enough fluency in adjacent disciplines that you can hold a conversation, make a decision, and move without a handoff. A PM who has never touched a design tool should be prototyping with AI assistance. An engineer who has never thought about distribution should be running their own content experiment. A marketer who has never looked at a pipeline dashboard should be learning what good GTM data actually looks like. None of this requires becoming an expert. It requires becoming dangerous enough to own more.

If you are a founder or a talent leader, the hiring signal for the new version of these roles is simpler than most people make it. Stop asking candidates to demonstrate depth in their primary discipline. Everyone who makes it past a first screen can do that. Start asking them to show you something they built or owned outside their core function. A designer who shipped a feature. A marketer who closed a customer. An ops person who built a product workflow. The people who are already living the new model of work are not waiting to be asked to expand. They are already doing it and looking for an environment that rewards them for it. Those are the people you want.

The layoffs are real. The AI spending is real. The ROI gap is real. But the story underneath all of it is not about replacement. It is about recalibration. Every major function is contracting around a smaller number of people who own more, move faster, and use AI to cover ground that used to require an entire team. The roles are not disappearing. They are expanding in scope and compressing in headcount, which means the people who fill them need to be built differently than the people who filled them before. For founders and talent leaders, this is a design problem: figure out what ownership actually looks like inside your org today and hire people capable of holding it. For individuals, this is an urgency problem: the window to adapt is open right now and it will not stay open indefinitely. The paste-up artist who learned Photoshop did not just survive the shift. They redefined what the role was worth. That same opportunity exists today, in every function, for anyone willing to pick up the full lifecycle and run with it. The ones who wait to see how this plays out are already behind.

When desktop publishing arrived in the late 1980s, entire departments existed around a single production chain. Paste-up artists arranged layouts by hand. Typographers set type as a dedicated craft. Color separators prepared printing plates. Darkroom technicians processed film. Each person was excellent at one narrow piece of the process and handed off to the next. Within a decade, a single graphic designer with a Mac could own the entire workflow. The roles did not disappear. They collapsed into one person with broader ownership and a higher compensation ceiling, because their value had multiplied. The specialists who thrived were not the ones who defended their lane. They were the ones who picked up the full lifecycle and ran with it. The ones who waited for the industry to come back to them did not make it.

That is what is happening now across every function, all at once, and most companies have not figured out what it actually means for how they hire and structure their teams.

AI was cited as a factor in over 55,000 U.S. layoffs in 2025 CNBC, and the pace is accelerating into 2026. But the default narrative that AI is simply replacing people misses the more important shift. Research from Harvard Business Review found that companies have been laying off employees because of AI's potential rather than its current performance. Salesforce Ben These are not efficiency cuts. They are structural bets. Companies are going lean now so that when their AI investments start compounding, the org is built to absorb them. Only 14% of CFOs say they have seen a clear, measurable return on their AI investments so far. CFO.com They are spending more, seeing less than expected, and restructuring anyway. Because the real move is not about today. It is about building a team that can actually operate in what comes next. And that means every role that survived is being asked to own something fundamentally different than what it owned before.

The modern product team was built around the handoff. A PM owned the roadmap and wrote the specs. An engineer owned the build. A designer owned the experience. Each person was excellent at their lane and the work moved through them sequentially. This model made sense when the scope of each discipline was genuinely too wide for one person to hold.

AI is changing that math.

What the roles are today:

• A Software Engineer who owns implementation within a defined technical scope

• A Product Manager who translates business needs into requirements and coordinates across functions

• A Product Designer who owns the visual and interaction layer and relies on engineering to execute it

What the roles are becoming:

• People who own a surface area, not a function. Someone who can move from identifying a problem to designing a solution to shipping it without losing momentum at every handoff

• Contributors who use AI to cover the gaps across disciplines rather than waiting for the right specialist to pick it up

• Fewer people with broader ownership, where the expectation is not that you do everything perfectly but that you can hold the full lifecycle of a problem and know when to go deeper

This is not about shrinking teams for the sake of cost. It is about recognizing that deep specialization in narrow lanes was always a workaround for tooling limitations. When one person can now move fluidly across design, scoping, and implementation with AI filling the gaps, the fragmented team structure becomes a liability, not an asset. Handoffs slow things down. Silos create misalignment. Waiting for the right person to pick something up kills momentum.

The teams winning right now are the ones where each person's scope of ownership is growing, and their compensation and title are reflecting that reality. That is not a reduction in value. It is an elevation of it. The same way a graphic designer in 1992 who mastered desktop publishing did not become less valuable than the five specialists they replaced. They became significantly more valuable because they could hold more of the outcome.

The traditional go-to-market team was built around clear handoffs and defined lanes. A Product Marketing Manager owned positioning, messaging, and launch. A Business Development lead owned partnerships, pipeline, and relationship cultivation. An Account Executive owned the close. Each motion had a dedicated owner and the machine scaled by adding people to each layer.

AI is collapsing the distance between those lanes.

What the roles are today:

• A Product Marketing Manager who owns messaging and positioning, produces launch materials, and hands off to sales with enablement assets

• A Business Development Manager who sources and qualifies partnership opportunities, manages relationship pipelines, and passes warm deals to an AE to close

• An Account Executive who receives qualified pipeline, runs a defined sales process, and closes within their assigned territory or segment

What the roles are becoming:

• A product marketer who owns the full narrative of a product, from positioning and competitive intelligence to customer-facing content to influencing how the product gets built, not just how it gets sold

• A BD operator who can identify a partnership opportunity, build the relationship, structure the deal, and see it through to revenue without a clean handoff to someone else

• An account owner who prospects within a defined market, closes business, and retains and expands the relationship over time, using AI to handle the research, outreach cadences, and reporting that used to require a supporting cast

The volume game is over. One person with strong instincts and the right AI tooling can own more of the customer journey than an entire segmented team could eighteen months ago. The hire that matters now is not the person who can execute one motion exceptionally well. It is the person who understands the full arc from awareness to close to expansion and can hold more of it than their job title used to suggest was possible.

Operations and HR were built around a simple premise: as the company grows, the volume of coordination, administration, and process management grows with it. More employees means more onboarding. More vendors means more contracts. More complexity means more people to manage it. Headcount in these functions was essentially a derivative of headcount everywhere else.

That relationship is breaking down.

What the roles are today:

• An HR Generalist who manages onboarding, compliance, benefits administration, and employee relations

• An Operations Manager who owns process documentation, vendor management, and cross-functional coordination

• A Recruiter who sources candidates, manages pipelines, and coordinates interviews across open roles

What the roles are becoming:

• A people strategist who uses AI to handle the administrative layer and spends their time on organizational design, culture, and talent judgment at a level that directly influences how the company is built

• An operations lead who architects systems and workflows rather than managing them, using AI to automate the coordination layer so human attention is reserved for decisions that require real context and judgment

• A talent partner who understands how AI is changing every function they hire for, redesigns roles in real time, and challenges hiring managers on what they actually need versus what they are used to asking for

IBM laid off around 8,000 employees from its HR department, replacing those functions with an internal AI tool, then began hiring software engineers and data analysts instead. FinalRoundAI The signal is clear. Transactional work in operations and people is being automated. What remains is more strategic, higher stakes, and requires a fundamentally different skill profile than the roles that came before. The people who will thrive here are not the ones who were best at managing the process. They are the ones who were always asking why the process existed and whether it could be better.

Here is the part of this conversation nobody wants to have openly. Not everyone currently in these roles is going to make the transition. That is not a judgment. It is just true. The paste-up artist who had spent fifteen years perfecting a physical craft was not a lesser person than the designer who picked up Photoshop in six months. They were just optimized for a world that was moving on. Some of them adapted. Some did not. And the ones who waited to see if the industry would stabilize before committing to the new way of working almost uniformly lost the window.

The same dynamic is playing out right now, and the window is moving faster than most people realize.

If you are an individual contributor in any of the functions above, the single most important thing you can do today is start tinkering outside your lane. Not to become a generalist in the abstract sense, but to build enough fluency in adjacent disciplines that you can hold a conversation, make a decision, and move without a handoff. A PM who has never touched a design tool should be prototyping with AI assistance. An engineer who has never thought about distribution should be running their own content experiment. A marketer who has never looked at a pipeline dashboard should be learning what good GTM data actually looks like. None of this requires becoming an expert. It requires becoming dangerous enough to own more.

If you are a founder or a talent leader, the hiring signal for the new version of these roles is simpler than most people make it. Stop asking candidates to demonstrate depth in their primary discipline. Everyone who makes it past a first screen can do that. Start asking them to show you something they built or owned outside their core function. A designer who shipped a feature. A marketer who closed a customer. An ops person who built a product workflow. The people who are already living the new model of work are not waiting to be asked to expand. They are already doing it and looking for an environment that rewards them for it. Those are the people you want.

The layoffs are real. The AI spending is real. The ROI gap is real. But the story underneath all of it is not about replacement. It is about recalibration. Every major function is contracting around a smaller number of people who own more, move faster, and use AI to cover ground that used to require an entire team. The roles are not disappearing. They are expanding in scope and compressing in headcount, which means the people who fill them need to be built differently than the people who filled them before. For founders and talent leaders, this is a design problem: figure out what ownership actually looks like inside your org today and hire people capable of holding it. For individuals, this is an urgency problem: the window to adapt is open right now and it will not stay open indefinitely. The paste-up artist who learned Photoshop did not just survive the shift. They redefined what the role was worth. That same opportunity exists today, in every function, for anyone willing to pick up the full lifecycle and run with it. The ones who wait to see how this plays out are already behind.