TLDR: The old paths of a comms career are collapsing. The new ones haven't been named yet. That in-between is where most of us are standing right now.
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Our new way of working feels like it’s all about transitions. Every week I talk to a different version of the same person who is going through some kind of change. Sometimes it looks like a VP of Comm’s role that got "restructured," other times it’s one comms person at a 40-person Series A, doing the work of four people, but mostly it’s the one who took the severance package, told everyone they were going independent, and six months in is still wondering how to price a retainer.
None of these people are exactly unemployed and none of them are exactly employed. They’re transitioning. They're all doing some version of freelancing a little, advising a little, interviewing a little, trying to figure out whether "consulting" is a real future or a nicer word for "in between jobs."
If that sounds familiar, I want to tell you three things.
One: it is not just you
Communications as a profession is being restructured entirely. We’re seeing large companies shrinking in-house teams; agencies lose the mid-tier clients that used to keep their junior layers staffed; and founders launching companies without traditional marketing or comms departments at all.
Last year, OpenAI reported more than 3 million paid business accounts on ChatGPT by mid-2025, up from 2 million just months before. You can only imagine what that number looks like 9 months later. My point with this is, every one of those accounts belongs to someone who now thinks they can do part of our job themselves.
They can't, actually. But the fact that they believe they can is the reason our work is shifting.
Just to really drill this point home, I’m going to tap on the good ol’ HBR study we’ve likely all seen by now where a tech company rolled AI out across 200 employees over eight months. If you missed it, the expectation was free time and the reality was silent workload creep. Everyone was doing more, at a shallower level, with less clarity about what was actually good.
So it’s not just comms people that are feeling this pinch. Founders and operators are also living this by drowning in first drafts and looking for someone who can tell them which one is good.
That someone who can tell them what good looks like is a comms person. But the way we guide them moving forward is no longer going to look like the comms jobs we’ve had in the past.
Two: the new shape of work is not one shape
Across every industry and company size, our work is taking a few shapes:
Solo consultants, others are building tiny two- or three-person firms
Solo employees embedded as the only comms person at a startup
Senior agency leads being asked to keep the same client roster with half the team
In-house at large companies, quietly learning how to build an AI as their chief of staff because of the new ‘do more with less’ corporate structure
What's consistent across all of those shapes is that whatever the work becomes for you, it's going to involve AI, and it's going to involve far more judgment than execution. AI is handling the first 80% of what we used to charge for. The final 20% — mostly made up of taste, signal prediction, relationships, the instinct for what will land with which audience on which day — is where our value lives now.
Most of us spent our careers proving our value through deliverables and calendar density. The trouble with how we’re operating now is that nobody trained us for this new version of hyper-productive work. To push this one level further, I would argue that the market is demanding processes and skills that are in many ways the opposite of what we know: new weekly planning cycles, 5 minute crisis responses, employees leaking every internal email, execs turning into scripted beige blobs, and a bunch of other things that need to be done faster. It requires a different set of muscles than the ones most of us built inside agencies and in-house teams.
Which brings me to the third thing…
Three: nobody is coming to figure this out for you
Trying to navigate a transition is really hard, especially when you’re the first in your inner circle to try something new. The truth is, your old boss is not going to be able to give you a playbook for how to productize a service, your LinkedIn feed won’t teach you how to pitch clients who don’t know what comms is, and a generic AI course is not going to teach you the unique set of AI skills that suit a comms person running a business, not a comms person working for a company.
You need other comms people for that. And not as a pep rally happy hour community, but as infrastructure for adaptation.
That's what we're always building at Comms People, and we will never stop building for what the market has on the horizon. When we started, we thought we were building a community / place where consultants and in-transition comms pros could talk to each other and feel less alone.
That was a start, but it wasn't enough. What we found was that everyone was still trying to reinvent the same FTE process and content wheel for their business, which we know doesn’t work.
So we kept building. Now, Comms People is where you come to learn the AI tools that are changing our work, steal the templates other consultants have already stress-tested, get smart guidance on how to set up your business uniquely tailored to your expertise, get warm leads through a paywall-free marketplace, and stop doing any of this in isolation.
We are biased toward people in motion. If you're transitioning out of an agency, out of a full-time role, or out of the assumption that the industry is going to look the same in six months years, this is your place.
We can't promise you a perfect path. Nobody has one to give right now. What we can promise is that the path will be drawn by the people who show up and keep showing up, and that you don't have to draw it alone.
If you recognize yourself anywhere in this post, come join us.
Apply to Comms People → commspeople.co/apply
