Lenny Rachitsky: AI Reshapes Roles Across Companies
Renowned product expert Lenny Rachitsky noted that engineers no longer need to write code themselves, as product managers can directly push products live, and design processes are disappearing due to time constraints.
Marketing teams can independently complete and launch campaigns, while SDR sales development roles are being replaced by AI, and everyone is becoming a data scientist.
In market mechanisms, companies are accelerating the adoption of AI tools to replace traditional functions, reallocating budgets and manpower from repetitive tasks to high-value decision-making and innovation. This trend drives capital to concentrate on AI productivity platforms, putting pressure on traditional SaaS tool providers.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Lenny Rachitsky has previously documented the impact of products and AI on organizations through the Lenny Newsletter. This observation of role reshaping continues his documentation of how tools like Notion and Figma have changed workflows, focusing on how AI shifts functions from execution to strategy.
In terms of capital flow, funds like a16z are investing in AI coding tools and multi-agent systems such as Cursor and Devin, shifting resources from hiring expansion to AI agent deployment. Companies are reallocating labor costs from mid-level functions to supervision and creativity, motivated by the goal of achieving 10x productivity gains with AI to cope with accelerated competition cycles.
Similar cases include Midjourney in 2023-2024 allowing designers to shift from pixel work to prompts, and Salesforce Einstein replacing some SDR roles. Current tech companies are transitioning from AI-assisted tools to full role replacements, with product thought leaders driving rapid organizational iterations.
Essentially, this represents technological substitution: traditional functional divisions are being fully replaced by AI agents. The root mechanism is that multimodal large models combined with automated workflows significantly compress execution time, enabling non-professionals to complete tasks that previously required years of experience, thus achieving a structural shift from labor-intensive organizations to AI-leveraged flat structures.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
AI is not a replacement for tools, but transforms everyone from executors into commanders. The disappearance of functions does not mean unemployment, but rather that productivity eliminates repetitive labor in one go. When everyone is a data scientist, the competition boils down to who can better define the problem.