A CEO I advise recently cut 75% of his team. AI can do anything a staff member earning under $70k can do, he told me. And do it better. This poses a big problem for Hollywood who see assistants as a cost centre. Are they all about to lose their jobs?
Maybe. But the smarter question is what happens after they do.
Every great executive in Hollywood started by answering phones, reading scripts and doing tedious admin work. That is training.
The assistant desk is where you learn how deals get made, how artists think, how power moves through a building. No AI tool teaches you that. You absorb it by being in the room.
The companies cutting junior staff right now are solving a cost problem today and building a leadership crisis for tomorrow. In 20 years, who runs these businesses?
A generation of executives who learned to negotiate through AI prompts instead of the flesh on flesh contact that builds instinct, sharpens taste and teaches you the heartbeat of a deal.
The entertainment industry runs on relationships. Five years on the assistants desk is where you learn who the players are, how they operate, who you can trust and who you cannot. That knowledge does not come from a prompt. It comes from being in the room, on the phone and at the table for years before anyone gives you a seat of your own.
If Hollywood cuts all these assistants jobs, the executives of the future will be terrible.
Warner Bailey built a 150k+ person community by making fun of the most powerful people in Hollywood while sitting at a desk ten metres away from them.
In this episode of The Black Hoody podcast, I sit down with the founder of Assistants vs Agents to talk about the broken economics of entry level entertainment jobs, how a meme page became a media company now repped by UTA, and whether AI is about to wipe out the very audience Warner built his business for.
We go deep on the real numbers behind the business model paradox of building a company for people who can’t afford to pay you and what UTA representation actually unlocks.
About Warner Bailey
Warner is the founder of Assistants vs Agents (AvA), a meme page turned media company that has partnered with Netflix, Disney, Paramount, Amazon MGM Studios, Apple TV+ and more. He was previously a talent agent assistant at WME and worked in touring at Live Nation.
Follow Assistants vs Agents: www.instagram.com/assistantsvsagents
