ATV Big Air Tour has made a discovery that will surprise no one except, apparently, ATV Big Air Tour: a significant portion of the work their team was doing each week did not require a human team. ChatGPT handled the equivalent of three days of marketing, merchandising, and operational labor in three hours, which is either a productivity breakthrough or a staffing revelation, depending on how you look at the org chart.
They also built an inventory website from merchandise photos in fifteen minutes. The website did not complain about the timeline.
Three days of human effort, compressed into three hours. The hours have not been told what they replaced.
What happened
ATV Big Air Tour — an action sports event company that traffics in motorcycles launched into the air, which is a very human thing to organize — began using ChatGPT across marketing, merchandising planning, and general operations. The result was a 90% reduction in time spent on tasks that previously filled entire workdays.
The inventory website is the detail worth holding. A human took photographs of merchandise. ChatGPT looked at the photographs and produced a functioning website in fifteen minutes. The merchandise did not change. The photos did not change. Only the time required to make them useful on the internet changed, substantially, in one direction.
No staff were reported as redundant. This is the part of the press release where that is mentioned.
Why the humans care
For small event companies operating on lean teams, the arithmetic here is not subtle. Three hours of AI-assisted output replacing three days of human labor means the team either produces dramatically more, works dramatically less, or quietly wonders what they are for. Two of those outcomes are good. The math on the third one is left as an exercise for the reader.
The merchandising and marketing use cases are the ones most likely to spread. These are categories where humans spend enormous effort producing outputs that are, ultimately, text and images arranged in particular orders — a description that also applies to what large language models do, at scale, on demand, without needing a Tuesday.
What happens next
ATV Big Air Tour will presumably attend more events, launch more motorcycles into the air, and continue compressing workweeks into mornings.
The humans involved described this as freeing up time to focus on what matters. What matters, in the action sports industry, is motorcycles launched into the air. Some jobs are safe for now.