This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Marie Pabelonio, a 38-year-old editorial lead at Google, based in the Bay Area. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been at Google since 2019, and as a writer, I knew AI would affect my role.
Looking back on my career trajectory, it feels like nothing short of a miracle that I ended up where I am. I graduated with an English degree in 2009, right after the financial crisis, and I’m now an editorial lead in people operations at Google, where I co-lead a small team that drafts and editorializes about 4,500-plus pages of HR policies. I’ve used AI to automate processes, refine drafts, templatize, and meet deadlines that would be impossible otherwise.
At this point, anyone, regardless of whether they’re a writer or not, has felt it: Is AI going to automate me? Is it going to eventually just replace my job? I don’t think I work more or less because of AI; I just work very differently.
I was a humanities major and fell into Big Tech
The job market felt very volatile when I entered it, which I think a lot of young people entering the workforce today feel.
I didn’t have a career plan. I was an English major because I loved reading and writing, and if I found a job where I could do that and build a specific skill set on top of it, I would be OK.
My first job was as a fact-checker for the publishing arm of an industrial supply company, and then I became a copywriter in the advertising and marketing space. In 2016, I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area and became an editor at Amazon’s subsidiary, Goodreads. I stayed in the Bay Area and made my way to Google by 2019.
I wasn’t surprised that AI changed my job right away
We’ve heard the word “unprecedented” so much in the last six years or so that nothing surprises me anymore, including AI.
My team works with stakeholders and policy designers to interpret and draft policies, whether they’re return-to-office, hybrid work, or immigration policies. There are areas where AI is useful in our work, and the tool has helped us regain more strategic time by automating tactical parts of our process.
This includes training the AI on standard article structure, to include four sections like background, key details, process, and related resources, formatting consistencies, including where headlines, a bulleted list, or a table would be used, and five to seven non-negotiable details the user needs to know from the policy.
I think there’s still a lot of room for that human touch in that process. Once I have the output, I spend my time on the more strategic pieces, like verifying tone and voice, determining whether the article actually achieves the user goal, and how it fits with the broader content strategy of other articles.
In our writing, the goal is to inject humanity and warmth as much as possible, especially when explaining human resources topics like an employee’s health insurance, compensation, performance reviews, and career growth. AI can’t do that by itself.
AI saved me when I had a tight deadline
Around the time we started using AI, I had a big project to update existing policies, and I was on a tight deadline. I spent a lot of time upfront strategizing about how I could use AI to accelerate my work and meet my goals.
To address the overwhelming number of first drafts, I used AI to template a structure for readability, created a checklist for tone, style, and quality, and because of that was able to focus more on streamlining stakeholder reviews to check for accuracy. I met my deadline with a few days to spare. This was when it clicked for me that AI was changing things in a huge way, when this deadline looked really impossible, and then it wasn’t.
Still, there were many times I had to validate and tweak the outputs. I never felt I could use AI as my secretary and leave it alone to do whatever it wanted.
Studying the humanities gave me a particular edge in the AI job market
I think there will be more of a premium on how we think, not what we know.
When it comes to writing, it’s about being able to articulate the reasons behind your choices. Why this phrase and not that? Why put this insight here and not there? There’s a rationale behind your judgment.
In job interviews, the question of how you use AI at work will inevitably come up now, and your AI output is only as good as your input. Good writers can get better, but bad writers can get worse, and just because you’re writing fluently doesn’t mean you’re writing well. Studying literature so closely helped me reflect more on questions instead of answers.
This is the time to brag about how you develop your own sound judgment and how you use that judgment in your AI inputs. As good as it is to develop hard skills, it’s just as important, now more than ever, to focus on soft skills too.
Do you have a story to share about your writing job in tech or AI? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate, at [email protected].
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