Patreon laid off twenty percent of its staff this week. Ninety-three people. It is the company’s largest cut since 2022, and if you have read enough of these announcements, you know the shape they usually take. This one is different, and the difference is worth slowing down for.
The memo CEO Jack Conte sent his team is unusually honest. It is also, if you sit with it for a minute, quietly arguing with itself. I think that argument is the most important thing an executive has said about AI and jobs in a long while, and I would guess almost no one is going to notice it. So let me point at it.
Here is the part everyone will quote. Conte went out of his way to say the cuts are not about trading people for machines. “We are not making the above changes because we believe AI replaces humans,” he wrote. AI, he went on, is “not a substitute for the creativity, judgment, detail orientation, or craftsmanship that our teammates have in spades.” It is a good line, and I believe he means it. Patreon’s whole business rests on human creativity and the connection between a creator and the people who support them. Just one week earlier, the company paid Cloudflare to block AI bots from scraping its creators’ work. When your product is that human, keeping the models out of it is not a publicity stunt. It is the strategy, stated plainly.
Now here is the part almost no one will quote, even though it sits a few sentences down in the very same memo. “AI has fundamentally transformed the tech industry,” Conte wrote, “including how we work, how we build products, how we communicate.” And then the honest clause: “That does have an impact on how we operate and organize.” Right after that, Patreon flattened its org chart and refocused its teams.
Read those two passages back to back and let them sit together for a moment. AI did not replace anyone. AI also transformed how the company works, which is exactly why the company is reorganizing and letting ninety-three people go. Both of those things cannot be fully true in the tidy way the memo wants them to be. Somewhere in the middle, something has to give.
I want to be fair here, because I do not think Conte is being slippery. I think he is trying to describe something real that our everyday vocabulary is just too blunt to hold. We keep asking the wrong question. The question is not “will AI replace this person.” The better question, the one that actually explains what happened, is quieter: will AI change the work enough that we end up organizing the company differently, and does the new shape simply need fewer hands. At Patreon, the answer to that second question was clearly yes. The answer to the first, by all accounts, was no. And here is the thing worth holding onto: those two answers do not contradict each other. They only sound like they do because we keep collapsing two very different questions into one.
This is the exact confusion I ended up writing a whole book about. It is called AI’s Missing Playbook: Aligning AI With the Goals That Move Your Business, and the Patreon memo is, honestly, a better trailer for it than anything I could have written myself.
Here is why. Most companies right now have AI in every corner of the building and almost nothing to show for it. The research keeps landing in the same uncomfortable place: somewhere between 88 and 95 percent of enterprises are capturing no real value from the money they are pouring in. Not because the tools are weak. Because nobody decided what the tools were supposed to be pointed at. The book is about closing that gap, and it does it the way the strategy books never quite do, with the actual mechanics: how to name what your business truly means by its own terms, how to redesign the work instead of just automating it, how to build a foundation your AI can stand on, and how to measure the value that compounds instead of the activity that just looks busy.
That is exactly the fork Patreon and Klarna walked up to, and chose differently.
Because the more familiar version of this story is the one Klarna lived through. Back in early 2024, Klarna proudly announced that its AI assistant was doing the work of roughly seven hundred customer service agents. A clean efficiency win, or so it looked. Then, more quietly, the company reversed course, because it had optimized for cost and headcount and slowly realized it had cut into quality, judgment, and the customer relationship along the way. Klarna’s own leadership admitted, in so many words, that it had leaned too hard on cost and that the result was not sustainable. That is what tends to happen when you treat AI as a headcount lever. You pull the lever, the number on the slide goes down, and a few months later you discover you subtracted something no spreadsheet had a column for.
Patreon, at least in its intentions, is the mirror image. Conte is refusing to pull that lever, and he is saying so out loud, to his own people, on the hardest possible day. He is telling them the machines are not the point, that the human edge is the product, and that the company is cutting to stay financially steady and reshaping the work rather than swapping people for software. That is a healthier instinct, and I want to give it real credit. It is also, if we are being honest with each other, a very convenient thing to say while announcing layoffs. So let us not rush to canonize the memo. Let us just notice what it proves without quite meaning to.
What it proves is the thesis of the whole book. Even the executive who most firmly rejects the “AI replaced them” story still had to reorganize his company because of what AI did to the work itself. The value never came from firing people and pointing a chatbot at their old jobs. It came, or failed to come, from whether the company knew what it was for and pointed the AI in that direction. Patreon decided it is for human creativity and human connection, and it is organizing around that answer, Cloudflare block and all. Klarna decided, for a season, that it was mostly for cost, and it is still cleaning up. Neither was saved or sunk by the model. Each was saved or sunk by its aim.
That is the difference between the companies that are quietly winning with AI and the ninety-plus percent that are just spending on it. Not better models. A better answer to “what is this for,” and the discipline to build toward it.
If the Patreon memo made something itch in the back of your mind, if you have felt that same quiet gap between all the AI your company owns and all the value it does not yet produce, that itch is the whole reason I wrote AI’s Missing Playbook. It will not hand you a bigger model. It will hand you the playbook for deciding what yours is for, and building until it gets there.
Read the memo one more time, both halves of it. Then, if you are ready to stop guessing at your own version of it, come pick up the book. The model is not the moat. What you choose to point it at is. Let me show you how to choose well.
Get the book
AI’s Missing Playbook: Aligning AI With the Goals That Move Your Business is available on Amazon.