While going through the new OECD working paper assessing macroeconomic productivity gains from AI, I came across something surprising.

Apparently the industry with the highest AI adoption rates in the US is the publishing and audiovisual sector? It includes everything from traditional print publishers to media conglomerates generating digital, broadcast, and streaming content.

It makes sense on giving further thought, but my knee-jerk response would be IT or maybe Education.

ai-adoption-rate-by-industry-us Source: OECD

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Googling “publishing industry layoffs” yields the following hits:

publishing-industry-layoffs

From Publishing Confidential,

The start of 2024 has not been kind to journalists. Sports Illustrated gutted its staff, the Los Angeles Times laid off over 20% of their newsroom (including their excellent book review editor—and the book review section’s future is uncertain, per the LA Times), Time magazine laid off over a dozen staffers (including their culture and health writers). Conde Nast employees conducted a one-day walkout to protest the company’s plans to lay off 5% of its staff. Pitchfork, a website I have been reading for 20 years, was folded into GQ, and its staff was let go.

Employment data for book publishers in the US paints a bleak picture too:

book-publishers-us-fred Source: FRED

Cursorily, most commonly cited reasons include sluggish sales and rising supply chain costs. Maybe they don’t want to say AI is behind at least some portion of the layoffs?

And this is despite OpenAI and the likes striking massive deals with publishers to use their content.

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Sora and Veo should really take off. The global entertainment and media industry alone is estimated to reach $3.4tn by 2028. Even if I take a conservative figure of $2tn, and couple that with high adoption, that’s huge!