The most interesting thing about AI-powered pipelines isn’t doing the same work with fewer people. It’s that the shape of what’s possible has changed, and our industry’s instincts haven’t caught up. The deeper shift is in the disciplines we’ve always treated as scarce. High-end graphics engineers who can do both gameplay and hardcore custom shaders are vanishingly rare. How might gameplay change when AI makes a shader cost pennies and is the same brain that’s helping write gameplay?

Similarly, how does this affect outsourcing? When more of the work, models, placeholders, shader variants, gets near-free to generate, that work stops being worth outsourcing at all. So the old territory shrinks. Does outsourcing and codev lose ground, or does it move up the stack and claim something new before the studio absorbs it by default? Does claiming it mean acting now? I’d like to compare notes with others wrestling with this from both the buyer and vendor sides, on what’s already turned over and what we’re quietly planning for.