AGENTIC AI REALLY IS THE END OF CREATIVE WORK AS WE KNOW IT
“Excellence withers without an adversary.” -Seneca
Let’s start with cloth. And the adversary of cloth.
Making cloth used to be pretty labour intensive.
Before the invention of the Spinning Jenny in 1764, and the Power Loom, in 1785, it took around three people to spin yarn.
And two to weave the cloth.
These machines brought in a revolution.
Family-run cottage industries died.
People left home to find new work
What they found was soul-destroying.
They found work in the new factories. They also found child labour, starvation wages, polluted air… not to mention the slum housing without proper sanitation.
Their new reality was a horroshow. The Luddites had a point…
AGENTIC AI WILL KILL A LOT OF JOBS
Work is changing forever again. And fast. Agentic AI is an adversary that will kill a lot of jobs.
Here’s the Creative jobs kill list:
High-volume content writers – Generic blog posts, product descriptions, and SEO filler will be fully automated.
Proofreaders and basic editors – AI grammar and style tools will handle 99% of this work.
Translators for standard texts – Routine document and website translations will be instant and accurate with AI.
Stock photographers – AI image generators will replace generic, on-demand stock imagery.
Commodity illustrators and designers – Low-level design work like social media graphics or simple logo variations will be handled by AI tools.
Basic video editors – Automated editing platforms will cut, caption, and format content without human input.
Entry-level copywriters – Routine ad copy, email templates, and microcopy will be produced automatically.
“The world is a hellish place, and bad writing is destroying the quality of our suffering.” – Tom Waits
A couple of years ago, like many other writers, much of my copywriting, content creation, and marketing freelance dried up.
Yet I’m optimistic. Because I think this is just temporary.
Agentic AI and AI in general is starting to create new types of work for writers.
And perhaps, human creativity is the way forward.
Because AI writing is bad writing. And however hard it tries, it just doesn’t have the invisible thing that makes something readable, entertaining, or meaningful to humans.
“The future of work is one where human empathy, creativity, and strategic judgment are no longer just desirable traits but are the core competencies that create and sustain a market advantage.”
Agentic AI Is AI With Wings
A few years ago, generative AI - the Large Language Model type 1 - was a newborn vehicle of possibility.
As a copywriter, I loved it.
Learning how to drive was fun.
Like going off-road with big wheels, the wind in your hair, and snacks.
After a while, I developed a process. A style. It went like this:
Write a prompt.
Get a boring, often a bit stupid, answer.
Refine the prompt.
Get a better answer.
Have a bit of a convo and refine with a creative twist.
Edit the raw draft (because the writing was terrible - stilted, dull, and a bit weird), add bits and check for ‘hallucinations’ or made up stuff.
Rewrite the whole thing so it flowed.
Nowadays, some models are better writers than others.
And some are better at deep research.
Using a combination of models is usual practice.
But really, the whole point (for marketing, business, copy, etc.) is STILL to use it as an assistant.
It does a bit of research, organises ideas, and analyses data into neat tables.
And you, the human, do the main bit.
AGENTIC AI FLIES BECAUSE IT’S A CAR AND A PLANE
So, now… in what seems like less time than it takes to watch all 3 series of Yellowjackets, AI has become one of those cars that turns into a plane and flies away..
When generative AI came along it did content.
Wonky, but useful content. Research really. A kitchen assistant chopping and preparing food fast.
It could outline an email well enough, and if you were a busy HR manager, you could just about get away with sending out something with minimal editing.
More and more businesses are finding they need to real writers of the human persuasion to do a couple of things though:
Write interesting, complex, well researched prompts.
Check the research finding - AI hallucinations are basically the computer telling lies for no good reason. It’s weird.
Rewrite and totally copyedit the raw text.
And often, just write the whole thing from scratch (using the research) ignoring the Ai because it’s sooooo generic.
Agentic AI is flying high - and it’s coming to the workforce like a plague of locusts, baby. But what does this mean? Is AI the end of work or just the beginning of work 2.0?
I mean, it’s very wizzy.
It can draft the entire first stage of talent acquisition.
By that, I mean it can clean up candidate records, apply judgment to score and rank them.
And then it can schedule interviews.
Mind you, as any recruiter will tell you - a human will need to interview.
And a lot of people make stuff up on their resume. Things which can only be weeded out by the human who knows what they’re doing picking up the phone to have a conversation.
It also leaves out the outlier. The person who would be brilliant at the job but as yet, has no experience in that area. Transferable skills are a deep ocean perhaps too deep for the average AI. After all, it’s just a set of instructions when you look at it.
Like the Lion, it doesn’t have brain.
Anyhoo, if you want to grasp the basics of how to build an agentic AI - read this.
Or, if you’d like to read a report I put together about creativity, the new human-AI workforce and Agentic AI [with the helpful ‘brain’ of Gemini AI] - read this…
AGENTIC AI MEANS WRITERS WILL HAVE TO BE CREATIVE AGAIN
If we do this revolution right, human creativity is the new industrial revolution.
New skillsets and more satisfying work is on the horizon. Why? Because humans want to connect with other humans.
We want to read stuff that we know has human hands involved in its creation.
Writers need to upskill and become experts on:
Story structure.
Content creation based on customer voice.
Copyediting AI stuff so it’s readable.
Critical thinking.
Creative writing.
Company branding voice.
POSSIBLE NEW JOB TYPESFor writers, copywriters, content creators
AI Content Strategist
Orchestrates human+AI creation across channels; owns briefs, voice, and outcomes. Harvard Business ImpactEditorial AI Lead (AI Editor-in-Chief)
Sets voice rules, builds prompt libraries, enforces style, fact-checks AI drafts. Harvard Business ImpactFact-Check & Verification Editor
Runs source checking, hallucination sweeps, citation standards. (Demand rises as AI volume grows.) Harvard Business ImpactConversation Designer / UX Writer for AI
Designs flows, tones, and safeguards for chatbots and agents. Harvard Business ImpactPersonaliSation & Lifecycle Content Manager
Uses AI segmentation to deliver 1:1 journeys (email, onsite, in-product). Harvard Business ImpactMultimodal Content Producer
Combines text+image+audio+video with gen-AI; rapid prototyping for campaigns. Goldman SachsSEO/Programmatic Content Engineer
Builds content systems with templates, data sources, and guardrails; measures search impact. Goldman SachsKnowledge Librarian / Content Ops
Maintains source-of-truth docs, snippets, and retrieval quality for Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG. Harvard Business ImpactBrand Voice Curator
Trains/style-tunes models to an approved voice; audits outputs. Harvard Business ImpactAudience Development & Community Editor
Human layer: feedback loops, qualitative insight, social listening to guide AI content. Harvard Business Impact
So, perhaps, in a strange, story loop kind of way, we’ve got the chance to do it. While the original industrial revolution led to all kinds of human misery and exploitation, this time around we’ve got a chance for:
Satisfying work for highly skilled adults.
In nicer places.
With air we can breathe.
And wages that we can live on.
To begin with, you could start by learning how to write stories with AI for free. And have some fun doing it.
Here’s a great video on how to write books using AI by the Nerdy Novelist. How to Write a GOOD Book with AI in 2025 (Step-by-Step Tutorial)
