A massive gap for AI-first employees on the market is the key reason layoffs keep happening while open jobs are staying live.
The business need remains.
➡️ But the 2020 playbook is completely irrelevant, obsolete, outdated, and 10x slower than the current norms.
Unpopular or not, the truth is:
❗Businesses can afford to NOT hire a few people today if they can find one that’s dramatically more effective, utilizing recent tools, LLM best practices, and light agentic models.
Can you imagine hiring content writers for blogs in 2026?
Or low-level designers for Photoshop flyers and cards?
Or a translator for non-legal document?
Jobs are rendered useless in a matter of months nowadays.
📈 Lovable became the fastest growing European startup ever in 12 months this year, and it’s one of the many, many, many shortcuts effective employees, executives, solopreneurs (and of course, agencies and consultancies) are using on a daily basis.
Virtually every single core cloud provider runs their own set of agentic systems and automated tools that are a lifesaver today.
Even if you travel 4 years back in time, professionals were proactively using Jasper, Zapier/Make, Canva, landing page builders, tools like Supermetrics to automate flows, creation, and funnels. Most people we interview in marketing or product have ever used 2 of these tops.
👉 Tools like Lovable/Replit, Gamma, Midjourney, HeyGen, Descript, ElevenLabs are already making it to job description requirements today. Given that all are PLG and user-based, it’s surprising how little adoption is proactively found during the job process.
Here’s a quick SWOT on what the market looks like in the new year (and how to ride it if you find yourself on the applicants’ side).
