Transcription
Who will buy things if AI takes everyone's jobs? I just saw a Tik Tok asking this question and can't help but think that nobody in marketing is answering it.
Pop culture actually answered this a few years ago. Shows like Squid Game and Severance, but we just didn't pay attention. In 2025, US employers cut over a million jobs. AI was cited in 55,000 of them.
But here's the thing. When a company replaces 700 customer service agencies with chat bots, those 700 people no longer have salary to spend on your products. Citrini research calls this ghost GDP. So here are the three consumer lanes forming when spending power disappears.
Lane one, the barbell economy. The ultra rich spend more at the top, everyone else trades down at the bottom, and the middle empties. If your brand sits in the middle, not luxury enough, not cheap enough, watch out.
Lane two, the access economy. People stop owning and start subscribing. This one is already happening. Think Netflix replacing DVDs, car subscriptions replacing ownership.
And finally, lane three, the creator economy. As the new middle class, they're not defined by a salary bracket, but by the ability to create, monetize, and adapt using AI as a tool. This is where the new aspirational consumer is going. The brands built entirely on aspirational spending will not exist in the next 5 to 10 years.