Editor’s note: This column is the first in a three-part series. Read part two here and part three here.
By Mark Himmelsbach and Remy Pinson
This story starts with a loss.
A client didn’t renew, so we reduced headcount. Operationally, it made sense, but the decision surfaced something bigger than a single role or contract: a growing tension inside modern leadership that’s becoming harder to ignore.
Our company spans a creative services business and an AI-powered software platform. That combination has made one trend obvious: The modern economy rewards software, automation and what investor and entrepreneur Naval Ravikant calls leverage — the “force multiplier for your work.”
Years ago, Ravikant bemoaned that labor — once the original form of leverage — had become “overvalued,” and that capital, code and now AI would define the next era. “You want the minimum amount of labor that allows you to use the other forms of leverage,” he wrote.
Sam Altman, perhaps the “face” of AI writ large, is famous for espousing the benefits of AI as the ultimate form of leverage, claiming that it will create “one person unicorns,” and that “[a]lmost everyone will want more AI working on their behalf.”
Investor enthusiasm around Cursor, Lovable and Mercor — companies with extraordinary output and extremely small teams — suggests he may be right. Humanoid robots, though still early, extend this trajectory even further.
Behind their enthusiasm, however, lies something the most fervent AI supporters seem reluctant to name. In this brave new world of AI, optimal business models continue to reward leverage, software and automation, of course, but they now also appear to reward something new: having materially fewer people.
As a consequence, we keep returning to a central question: What happens when the efficient thing and the decent thing diverge, even temporarily?
The economic pressure is clear, but the human pressure is just as real. We all seem convinced that we’ll remake our workflows with AI, but what of our culture — the intangible connective tissue beneath it all? It’s no coincidence that before AI, the best companies often had the best cultures. In fact, not only do we believe this dynamic will continue as we adapt to AI, we think it will become even more important.
The future of work — perhaps, even, the future period — will invariably depend on how humans and machines collaborate, but it will also depend upon the culture we create that holds that collaboration together.
The frameworks, norms and practices that will eventually govern human-AI partnerships are critical, but they remain undefined. And we’re all going to have to build that culture largely from scratch.
Mark Himmelsbach is the co-founder of the world’s newest creative AI marketing tool, RYA. He’s also the co-founder of Episode Four, an advertising agency that leverages data to make hits for Visa, Invesco QQQ, Charles Schwab, AT&T and many other marquee brands. Over the past two decades he has led cross-functional teams and developed multidiscipline communications and creative strategies for both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Himmelsbach is a MBA graduate from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
Remy Pinson is head of business development at WestComms. He strongly believes that high-quality communication will only continue to appreciate in value and supports clients working in AI, crypto and frontier technologies. Pinson still keeps a regular hand-written journal, loves wine and earned a degree in economics and philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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