In the early 1990s Christian Crumlish joined Sybex, a computer‑book publisher later acquired by Wiley in 2001, and described a five‑person production chain that turned an author’s manuscript into a printed book, involving the author, an editor, a "word processor" who typed into a Wang machine, phototypesetters, and proofreaders. When desktop PCs and WordPerfect arrived around 1993, the "word processor" role vanished and the workflow shrank dramatically, a change Crumlish now mirrors by building Piper Morgan, an AI‑driven product‑manager assistant staffed entirely by AI agents, launched in June 2024.
The story illustrates how digital tools and AI can compress entire occupational layers, forcing companies to rethink talent pipelines and invest in automation to stay competitive. It also signals that product‑management functions are becoming a prime target for AI augmentation, reshaping hiring and budgeting decisions across tech firms.