New York City
AI Startup That Fired All Its Humans Has Nobody Left To Turn The Lights Off
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
NEW YORK, NY -- Economists and urban planners are raising alarms this week about what happens to New York City the morning after the artificial intelligence investment bubble finally stops pretending it is not a bubble, and the picture they are painting looks a great deal like 2001 except with better coffee shops and worse severance packages.
The concern, outlined in a report by The City Reporter, is that the AI sector has colonized the same Midtown South zip codes that briefly housed the dot-com boom, filled them with the same impossible valuations and free snack walls, and is now approximately eighteen months from discovering that the original lesson of Pets.com was not, in fact, that the logo needed to be cuter.
Pets.com raised $82.5 million in a February 2000 IPO, achieved a market capitalization that assumed every American household would eventually mail-order its kibble, and was liquidated by November of the same year. It had a sock puppet. The sock puppet outlived the company by several years, which is now considered an early proof of concept for AI.
"The fundamentals are extraordinary," said Derek Voss, Chief Evangelist at a Flatiron District company called Cognify, which has declined on four separate occasions to explain what Cognify does. "We are not in a bubble. A bubble implies there is nothing inside it. We have product. We have traction. We have a waitlist." Voss added that Cognify's waitlist itself has a waitlist, which he described as "a signal."
The signal the city's commercial real estate brokers are reading is somewhat different. Vacancy rates in Hudson Yards, once described by its own developers as the neighborhood Amazon would have chosen if Amazon had slightly more money and less taste, have climbed for the third consecutive quarter. Several floors that were leased to AI infrastructure startups in 2023 now contain only a ring light, a branded hoodie draped over an Aeron chair, and a Slack channel that has not been posted in since February but still sends automated birthday reminders.
For New York, the math of a sector collapse is less abstract than it sounds. The dot-com bust between 2000 and 2002 erased roughly 79,000 jobs in the city, cratered the commercial real estate market that had been built around it, and sent the tax base into a hole that September 2001 then deepened considerably. The city recovered. It always recovers. It recovered by telling itself the next thing was different, which is the most New York possible response to evidence.
The current next thing employs a category of worker whose job title did not exist in 2021 and may not exist in 2027. "Prompt engineer" became a serious line on a serious resume. "Head of AI Strategy" became a salary band. "AI Ethicist" became something companies listed in their hiring pipeline to avoid a different kind of news story. All three of these titles are, at this moment, being quietly swapped on LinkedIn for "Operations" and "Consultant" and "Exploring New Opportunities," which is the professional equivalent of a company beginning to box up its own plants.
Chris Pallotta, a workforce transition specialist who has been retained by several firms he is not allowed to name, said the displacement pattern is already underway. "What we're seeing is that companies automated the roles they thought were repetitive, and then discovered the repetitive roles were the ones that knew where everything was," Pallotta said. "You cannot ask the AI where the backup drive is. The AI does not know it came in a box from Best Buy in 2019 and is currently under Marcus's old desk."
Marcus, it should be noted, was let go in the first round.
City officials have so far responded to the warning signs by announcing a task force, which is what city officials do when they would like to acknowledge a problem without doing anything that costs money before the next election. The task force will study the workforce implications of AI displacement and is expected to release a preliminary framework by Q3 of next year, at which point the bubble will have already made its own scheduling decision.
In the meantime, at least one fully automated startup in the Hudson Yards corridor has, according to a building manager who asked not to be named, been running its HVAC on a setting nobody can change because the facilities app requires a login that was attached to an email address belonging to an employee who was replaced by the AI in March.
The office is currently 84 degrees.
The AI, when asked about it, suggested opening a window.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/10/06/new-york-ai-bubble-bust-wall-street-budget/