Cheap production barbells a field, it doesn't raise the bar evenly

The "bar rises" story imagines cheap AI pulling everyone up to a higher baseline. That's not what cheap production does. When the routine work collapses to the cost of inference, the field splits. A thin tier doing real judgment and framing work pulls away. The broad remainder gets folded into generalist roles, where analytics is an assumed skill and analytics-as-a-job disappears. The middle thins.

The evidence already shows this shape. Dedicated people analytics practitioners peaked near 12,000 in late 2022 and have been falling since. Of people who left a dedicated seat after 2021, 83% never took another - they went to HRBP, recruiting, generalist roles. Staying loyal to the title cost you money.

The optimists' best rebuttal: a dead job title isn't a dead capability. Typing stopped being a profession and became a baseline skill, and that was progress. But that analogy concedes the point. The typist job did vanish. It was fine because there was no high end to typing. Analytics has a high end. That high end doesn't diffuse to a generalist with a chatbot. It either concentrates in a few hands or gets taken by Finance.

Source claim: When the production layer gets cheap, a field doesn't just raise its bar - it splits, with a thin judgment tier pulling away while the broad remainder becomes a baseline skill folded into generalist roles.