Labor Day 2025. On the Precipice?

Labor Day 2025. On the Precipice?

Labor Day became a national holiday in 1894. A parade of horse drawn carriages led a New York City parade, celebrating the social and economic contributions of working Americans. Carriage drivers had just formed a new union (the Teamsters) and prospects for the profession were improving, with over three hundred thousand employed in the US.

20 years later, carriage driving as a profession was all but gone, disrupted by the automobile.  Beginning with the industrial revolution, waves of technological advances swiftly eliminated entire categories of work, while creating brand new ones. Several carriage makers (such as Studebaker and Chevrolet) adapted, evolving into automobile manufacturers, and tens of thousands of carriage drivers became the first employees of the nascent auto industry.

This Labor Day, 131 years later, we sit at the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, led by the rise of AI. It's natural to wonder if we are on the precipice of a similar disruption, and if professional publishing, journalism, and communication will face a similar rapid reordering. We thought it would be useful to take stock of where we are (really) and what the early returns might be telling us about how this new revolution might unfold.

The Power Law of AI.

We have been working with enterprise customers and with all the major AI models for the better part of 18 months. Everyone in news, corporate communications, and professional writing is experimenting with AI.  Despite the boosters ("AGI and unlimited abundance are just around the corner") and the doomers ("AI is going to eliminate all labor and we will all be unemployed"), AI in 2025 is neither a savior nor a destroyer. It is proving to be an exciting platform, a useful tool, and a sometimes inconsistent assistant to human labor.  Some industries are seeing more of an impact, with coding and engineering at the forefront of productivity gains and changing work practices. But in the industry and job functions that we serve, the outcomes are varied. Some are seeing marginal value from AI, while others are already achieving enormous gains.

A recent MIT study made global headlines by claiming that 95% of AI projects had failed to deliver productivity. https://mlq.ai/media/quarterly_decks/v0.1_State_of_AI_in_Business_2025_Report.pdf. For anyone that actually read the report looking for more than bias confirmation, the data tells the story of an extreme distribution of outcomes. Many projects failed, but some were wildly successful. The determining factor was the way that organizations approached AI, and the effort that they put into it. Experimenting with discrete tasks across disparate applications without a mandate did not deliver tangible gains. Asking ChatGpt a question may be easy and fun, but its not transformative. Low effort, low return. But organizations that approached AI as a real opportunity and adapted their work and processes to meet the technology where it is were able to achieve significant results.  

What we are seeing in our pilots and with our customers confirms this. Symbolic has been able to deliver extraordinary results for customers who have approached AI as a priority, have invested in it, and are willing to adapt their work processes. We are regularly achieving real returns of 50-70%+ ROI on AI enabled projects, across multiple individuals, teams, and organizations. But equally we have seen enterprises experiment with AI without a plan or purpose, only to be disappointed. Are those who are getting the most out of AI putting themselves at the greatest risk of disruption? Perhaps "just dabbling" is the sensible approach right now? Putting aside the fallacy that you can mitigate the impact of technological change by ignoring it, the answer depends on how those gains are actually showing up.

Productivity Applied

For those customers who are making the commitment to AI, and seeing the returns, how are those returns being captured? To date, we are not aware of a single job loss that's attributable to AI adoption through Symbolic. What we have actually seen:

Content Expansion: covering more topics, markets, people. Significantly more. In some cases 20x the output, with no quality degradation, and no additional investment. A Symbolic customer is in the process of moving from 4% coverage of a key financial market to 99% coverage, with no incremental investment.

New Content Sales: covering niche areas of interest that were previously uneconomic to address, and monetizing that content in new ways. A Symbolic customer is using the platform as a tool for its domain specialists, who are creating packages of vertical content that have narrow but high value audiences, and selling those packages at a premium.

Higher Quality Work: Publishing and communication has always been one part insight and one part production. Eliminating production busy work frees more time to create value. A Symbolic corporate customer is doing internal and external newsletters in 25% of the time that it took previously, when they were churning out newsletters in a formulaic fashion. Now, recaptured time is being applied to making the newsletters better, sharper, more differentiated and more interesting.

Consistently Better Output: AI may have initially been focused on high volume, low stakes communication, but publishers are now using AI to significantly improve quality control and to enforce brand and voice across the enterprise. A Symbolic customer is using fact checking, format, and voice checks to systematically cover broad portfolios of its original content when previously that work was ad hoc, expensive and inconsistent. 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution: Where We Go From Here

There is no avoiding the fact that AI will improve, and jobs and work will be created and lost as the fourth industrial revolution progresses. We started Symbolic to create an opportunity for our customers from the application of this exciting technology, and to help them shape it rather than to be passive observers. We firmly believe that civil society needs fact based human communication and news, and that it can thrive in the era of AI. But this is not inevitable, and it won't happen for everyone. AI will not simply deliver positive transformation without platforms like Symbolic and the adaptability of the customers who use it.  For those that are making the investment, the benefits they are achieving are what we hoped for when we began: new growth; less busy work, more high quality communication, journalism and insight. No one is guaranteed survival or success, but they can have a seat at the table. On this Labor Day, at the precipice of change, we are optimistic that there is an exciting future for those that see and meet the opportunity.

That's it from us this week. We are always working to improve Symbolic and make your experience more efficient and enjoyable. We would love to hear your feedback and any suggestions you may have for future updates. Don't hesitate to reach out to team@symbolic.ai.