I keep seeing the same pattern in enterprise AI work, and the agency layoffs are the loudest version of it yet.
The work that disappears first is the legible work, the stuff you could already put on a timesheet or a slide. In every deployment I've been part of, the tasks AI absorbs cleanest are the ones that were already measurable and repeatable. What survives is the judgment nobody could quite write down.
The holding companies sold the legible. Hours, decks, strategy days, billable activity. That is exactly the layer AI commoditizes first. So when WPP cuts 9,000 roles and Dentsu and Havas shed thousands more, it looks like AI eating advertising. I think it is something slower, a business model that has been draining value for years and is finally being exposed.
Which makes the layoffs a lagging indicator. The work does not vanish. Agencies and services still matter, but the river that fed them has changed course, and the ones that make it will follow it to where the value runs now: the judgment, the taste, and the trust a model cannot reach.
That is the thread I pull in this week's Foraging, with the full scene at Cannes.
Link in comments.