This told essay is based on a conversation with Marie Pabellonio, 38, a Bay Area-based executive editor at Google. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
I’ve been working at Google since 2019, and as a writer, I knew AI would impact my role.
When I look back on my career trajectory, I feel that it was nothing short of a miracle that I reached my current position. I graduated with a degree in English in 2009, right after the financial crisis, and am now Editorial Director of Human Resources at Google, where I co-lead a small team that drafted and edited over 4,500 pages of HR policy. I’ve used AI to automate processes, refine and template drafts, and meet deadlines that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
We’ve all felt it at this point, whether you’re a writer or not. “Will AI automate me?” Will it eventually just replace my job? I don’t think I’m doing my job more or less because of AI. However, I work in a completely different way.
I majored in humanities but got rejected by Big Tech.
When I started, the job market felt very unstable. I think many young people entering the workforce today feel the same way.
I didn’t have a career plan. I majored in English because I loved reading and writing, and I think as long as you can do that and find a job that allows you to develop a specific skill set, you’ll be fine.
My first job was as a fact checker in the publishing department of an industrial supply company, and then I became a copywriter in advertising and marketing. In 2016, I moved from Chicago to the Bay Area to become an editor at Goodreads, an Amazon subsidiary. I stayed in the Bay Area and used Google by 2019.
I wasn’t surprised that AI quickly changed my job.
Over the past six years or so, I’ve heard the word “unprecedented” so often that nothing surprises me anymore, including AI.
My team works with stakeholders and policymakers to interpret and draft policies such as return to the office, hybrid work, and immigration policy. There are areas in our work where AI can help, and this tool has helped us reclaim more strategic time by automating the tactical parts of the process.
This includes training the AI on standard article structure to include four sections such as background, key details, process, and related resources, consistent formatting including where headings, bulleted lists, or tables are used, and the five to seven non-negotiable details that users need to know from the policy.
I think there’s still a lot of room for a human touch in that process. Once you have the deliverables, spend your time on the more strategic parts, such as validating your tone and voice, determining whether your article is actually achieving your users’ goals, and how it fits into your broader content strategy for other articles.
In our writing, we aim to inject as much humanity and warmth as possible, especially when discussing human resources topics such as employee health insurance, compensation, performance reviews, and career advancement. AI alone can’t do it.
AI saved me when I had a tight deadline.
When I first started using AI, I had a large project to update an existing policy, and the deadline was looming. I spent a lot of time pre-strategizing how to use AI to accelerate my work and achieve my goals.
To deal with the overwhelming number of first drafts, we used AI to create templates with readable structure and checklists for tone, style, and quality. This allowed us to focus on streamlining stakeholder reviews to check accuracy. I met the deadline with a few days to spare. When this deadline seemed truly impossible, it dawned on me that AI was going to change things in a big way, but that wasn’t the case.
Still, there were many times when I had to verify and adjust the output. I never thought I could use an AI as my secretary and leave it alone to do whatever I wanted.
Studying humanities gave me a particular advantage in the AI job market
I think it will become less about what we know and more about how we think.
When it comes to writing, it’s important to be able to clearly express the reasoning behind your choices. Why is this word used instead of that one? Why put this insight here and not here? There is a rationale behind your judgment.
Job interviews will inevitably ask you how you will use AI in your work, and the output of AI is only as good as the input. Good writers can get better, bad writers can get worse, and just because you write fluently doesn’t mean you write well. Studying literature closely has helped me think more deeply about questions rather than answers.
Now is the time to brag about how you’re developing your own sound judgment and how you’re applying that judgment to your AI inputs. Developing hard skills is good, but it’s more important than ever to also focus on soft skills.
Do you have a story to share about your writing career in technology or AI? Contact this reporter, Agnes Applegate: aapplegate@businessinsider.com.