Late last month, we put up a sign. Thirty feet tall, 230 feet wide, with white letters on a hillside along the 101 in Los Angeles. We built it to film a project. Nobody knew that. All Angelenos saw were enormous letters appearing on a ridge overlooking the freeway, and the city lost its mind. Commuters slowed down to film it. TikTok and Reddit filled up with people trying to figure out what it was. Local TV ran segments. Tom Sandoval from Vanderpump Rules posted on Instagram, worried it would block his Hollywood Hills view. We hadn’t announced a thing.
When we unveiled the campaign that the sign was for, I felt what you’d expect. Elation. Relief. The specific satisfaction of a project landing the way you designed it to land. And then, within hours, something I hadn’t planned on. A thought that sat in my stomach like a stone: I may have just spent months building the most compelling argument for why my own role is about to be fundamentally rewritten.
The sign spelled out the name Billy Boman. Boman is an AI video director based in Stockholm. His clients include Google and Klarna. He works largely alone with AI tools and delivers commercials and videos that compete with those produced by the largest advertising agencies. No massive crews. No seven-figure budgets. No months of work for a 30-second ad.
I spent 20 years building a career around knowing how complex, expensive things get made. At Nestlé and SodaStream, I was the one unlocking the budgets. I knew the agencies, the producers, the line items. I knew what a shoot in Buenos Aires would run versus Cape Town, which editing house in London would deliver on deadline, how to get a project approved before the window closed.
That knowledge — the ability to operate a system built on expensive access and insider relationships — was a big part of what made me valuable.
Watching those letters go up on that hillside, I understood something uncomfortable: the system I spent two decades learning to navigate is being disassembled. Not by a competitor. Not by a market correction. By a guy in Stockholm with a laptop and a point of view.
The anxiety underneath most conversations about AI isn’t really about job titles or org charts. It’s more personal than that. It’s the realization that skills you spent years accumulating — skills that felt like hard-won expertise — can now be approximated by systems that are faster, cheaper, and increasingly good enough. That’s a disorienting thing to reckon with, whether you’re a chief marketing officer, an architect, a journalist, or anyone whose career was built on knowing things that used to be hard to know.
I don’t have a clean answer to what comes next. Anyone who tells you they’ve figured out what their role will be in five years is either lying or selling something. But I find myself more curious than I expected. The question is worth sitting with honestly rather than rushing to some reassuring conclusion that “AI is just a tool.”
Here’s what I keep coming back to. Boman is not valuable because he uses AI. Plenty of people use AI. He’s valuable because he brings a visual sensibility, a creative instinct, and a point of view that no prompt can generate. The technology expands what he can execute. It doesn’t do the thinking for him. The gap between someone who can operate AI tools and someone with genuine judgment is the one that will define who thrives and who gets replaced. That’s true for directors. It’s true for executives. It’s true for the analyst, the copywriter, the paralegal, the consultant. It’s probably true for anyone reading this.
Which is also why we built a real sign. We could have rendered it in AI. A photorealistic hillside, indistinguishable from the real thing. Nobody would have known the difference. But it never would have stopped traffic. It never would have ended up on the evening news. The organic chaos that made this project work required something that existed in the physical world — commuters pulling over, Reddit threads multiplying, news crews showing up. Something people could drive past and wonder about. Knowing when the real thing still matters is judgment too.
The most Hollywood thing you can do right now is convince yourself the old playbook still applies. And it’s not just Hollywood. Across industries — creative, legal, financial, technical — the systems people like myself spent careers mastering are being rewritten. I spent months building a sign to promote someone who represents the end of the world that made my career possible. And yet, something is shifting. Curiosity is no longer just a counterweight to vertigo. It’s beginning to quiet it.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
