I had hired ten people. Young, bright, eager to learn. They wanted to learn from me, and I told myself I was giving them the environment I once needed.
That was true. It just wasn't the only reason. The other was that it flattered my ego. Ten people who listen to you are an agreeable form of affirmation. It took me longer to admit that to myself than it took me to hire them.
We worked well together. A concept for a client usually took two weeks. Somewhere in those two weeks I would sit down with a colleague for three hours and go through it. Afterward it was okay. It was never outstanding.
Okay is a problem in my business, because no one names it. A client does not complain about a concept that is fine. They simply don't book again next time.
I gave my colleagues the stage in front of clients because I wanted them to develop. And I saw something in the faces of the board members that I knew how to read and did not want to read: polite interest. Experienced people don't want energy. They have energy themselves. They want depth, and at thirty you almost never have depth, because it is made of years you have not yet lived.
Then we built Emily.
Emily is not a person. She is an AI-powered copilot with access to all of our knowledge — our models, our language, fifteen years of work. One afternoon I gave her a briefing. After two minutes the first usable thoughts came back. After an hour I had a concept that held. It took me literally, it asked follow-up questions where I had been imprecise, and it knew the philosophy of the house better than the colleague who had been with us for eight months.
I was not thrilled. I remember something colder. In that hour something became clear to me that I had known for more than a year and had not said to myself.
The sentence I used to explain it for months afterward went like this: what my clients needed no longer matched what my team could offer. The sentence is true. It is still not honest, because it sounds as though something had happened that no one is responsible for. The truth is: I had hired ten people for a business I no longer believed in by the time they started. They were not too slow. They were working inside a structure I had built and no longer wanted.
You could counter that the market really did change and that my justification was therefore not an excuse. That is even true. The only question is when I knew it. A justification that appears only after the decision has been made does not explain the decision. It explains why I can live with it.
I slept badly during those months. Then I did it and parted with eight of the ten.
In such cases people say they parted on good terms. I have heard that phrase often and rarely believed it. With us it was true, as far as it can be true when one side leaves and the other stays and both know who made the decision.
Since then there are three of us. That is not a hermitage but the size at which I still know what everyone is working on. I am closer to the people I want to work with, and I am better for it. That is not a neat punch line, it is simply the case.
One of the two who stayed is young. He works with these tools faster and more inventively than I do, and I learn from him every day. That is the point at which my own story does not add up.
What won't let me go is something else. Emily did not replace what is hard about this profession. She replaced what was mediocre about it. And mediocrity is not a characteristic of young people but a phase everyone passes through. It took me fifteen years in a bank to get past it, and the entire time someone was paying for me to be allowed to need it.
The question I have no answer to is not whether machines replace people at the start of their careers. They already do. The question is where those people are supposed to spend the years in which they are not yet good.
At some point someone will do to my work what Emily did to theirs. I hope I notice it sooner then.
Emily herself, by the way, did nothing. She wrote a concept. Everything else I knew beforehand and had not said out loud. That is how mirrors work.