We wrote up an initial commentary about the Bike Europe editorial shake up, or “restructuring” as it has been labelled, on a recent edition of our bimonthly newsletter.
On the surface a seemingly insignificant event (hardly so for the people on the receiving end of course) at a Bicycle Industry news publication may seem a little off topic for any consideration here, let alone in detail.
What we’ll argue is it shows the impact that AI is starting to have, even if indirectly, on business and company structure.
We’ve made the case elsewhere on how company structure is likely to transform radically with the rise of Agentic Economy. Speculative at the time (merely months ago!), the AE is growing exponentially, month on month.
The Bike Europe incident gives insight into one dimension of how the reconfiguring process is unfolding.
Contents
Nobody Was Fired by a Machine
Jan-Willem van Schaik joined Bike Europe in 2007. Fast forward almost two decades later, his role as editor-in-chief was discontinued in October 2026
Rosie Burgin joined in March 2020 and spent six and a half years covering the international industry and its supply chains. Her role was discontinued too.
Both used the same word for it . . . “restructuring”.
Cycling Industry News reported the departures on 25 September; the publisher, VMN Media, hadn’t announced anything.
A common imagining of the way in which AI is likely to take over human roles is overly simplistic. A company chooses a model, or signs on to a platform that may orchestrate switching amongst models most suitable to carry out specific tasks.
Or, given the sensitivities around data sharing, they install a local model on a local server—totally niche now, but likely to become the default; at the time of writing Meta open-sourced the 816B Muse Spark Open, and Apple, under new CEO John Ternus, made peace with Meta to run it locally. The model does the work of a department. A date is set, people clear their desks, and it’s on to Universal Basic/High Income payments.
VMN Media’s CEO took over the job in January; the company acquired a research company, Telecompaper, in March. There’s no smoking AI gun apparent. All you find is an analyst, a data engineer and a combined editor-in-chief.
A sceptic will call this an ordinary reorganization. But look deeper, and another logic can be seen at work.
Reading the Org Chart
What happened at VMN Media looks anything but boring when looked at from the right way.
We find two senior editorial roles—an editor-in-chief and a senior editor—gone. Now look at what VMN Media is advertising.
One editor-in-chief, for Bike Europe and Tweewieler together. So the job that used to belong to one publication now covers two.
That editor-in-chief leads two editors, one of them advertised as junior. Beside them sit a market analyst, a data engineer and a digital product team.
The ad describes the new mission as a move “from news provision focused on current events, to data-driven and forward-looking market and consumer insights.”
- data driven 2. forward looking, insights into future trends based on data analysis.
The data engineer vacancy involves:
- automating research processes
- collecting data from different sources
- building scraping tools (guess what will do the building!) and then
- using AI and machine learning to enrich data and content.
The hire works with the Telecompaper team.
The customers, then, transform from brands and manufacturers trying to reach an audience with product offerings, to the provision of forward looking, high-quality business analytics, aiming to predict what people will buy.
That information (data > information) becomes the new product and that product explains the chart restructuring. A trade journalist exists because the product is stories. No longer. Simply, change the product and the job goes with it.
How Does the GBPI Fit in Here?
An earlier initiative underwriting this new direction is the creation of the Global Bicycle Purchasing Index (GBPI) by Eurobike and IFH Cologne.
A survey covering purchasing managers, product managers and supply-chain managers about incoming orders, inventory, lead times and what they expect next, the first round, in February and March 2026, drew 91 interviews across more than 22 countries.
Ninety-one is a small sample. The key element is that Bike Europe’s readers are central. The people who used to consume the product now supply it. They answer the survey, the research partners turn the answers into an index, and Bike Europe publishes the index back to the same people (pretty much the Big Tech playbook btw).
Advertising sold readers’ attention. This potentially sells what readers know.
Bike Europe already markets paid market reports and quarterly statistics, so a paid tier on top of the index is easy to imagine.
One more detail. The September call for participation asks respondents how they use AI in procurement and how willing they are to invest in it over the next 12 months. The publisher is reorganizing around AI and polling the industry about AI in the same quarter. Coincidence? Probably. But it does show where the attention sits.
The industry supplies the data, and the publisher may one day sell it back to the industry.
So Just How Involved is AI?
Let’s start with what the published material does not say.
Nothing from VMN Media states that AI is why these two roles went. The reasons given are restructuring and a new direction . . . and, again, we’re just thinking out loud as we look at what’s visible.
The data engineer vacancy is where AI clearly shows up. Consider the tasks:
- Watching manufacturers’ announcements.
- Sorting what turns up by company, product and country.
- Flagging odd movements in import volumes or prices.
All of this used to be the early, slow part of trade reporting, the hours leading to the writeup. Here it’s a job description—and a piece of cake—for agents.
An analyst then turns the output into stories. The market analyst ad mentions producing articles, so writing survives. It just moves downstream, to someone who starts with a dataset rather than a phone call.
Now look at the economics.
Telecompaper is the working model, and VMN’s CEO said its methods could be applied to other titles in the portfolio.
In September VMN also announced the acquisitions of Entree and VerpakkingsManagement. A data pipeline costs the same to build whether it feeds one title or six. Each added title makes the next one cheaper.
That is the case for AI as cause. AI makes a small team viable; makes a combined editor-in-chief sensible; makes two senior editors, whose value was partly the labor of gathering, harder to justify on a spreadsheet.
Whether anyone at VMN reasoned that way, we’ll never know. The structure they chose seems to fit with such an explanation all the same.
But —You’ll Never Hear it Called an AI Layoff
“Restructuring” is the word both editors used about their own departures. It’s the word the evidence supports, sure. It’s accurate—and tells you nothing.
Consider what an announcement of the other kind would take.
A publisher would have to say that software now does part of what two senior editors did, something no company is going to broadcast since It invites questions from a host of interested parties, ie. readers, advertisers and the staff who remain.
So the news arrives through a Cycling Industry News report citing a Dutch outlet, two personal LinkedIn posts and a stack of job ads. As of 10 October, VMN had made no formal announcement. Bike Europe’s own team page still listed both editors with their old titles.
Labor statistics track job titles. Two editor titles shrink, and an analyst and a data engineer appear. A headcount across the whole operation could look flat. The editor who loses a job and the analyst who gets one cancel out on paper. Nobody is unemployed in the aggregate, so there is no apocalypse to report.
And it happens one step at a time. A new CEO in January, an acquisition in March, more acquisitions in September, vacancies in October. Each step is ordinary business. Only the sequence looks like anything.
The Art of the Business Restructure
Bike Europe is a media company; file the case under media if you will.
The point is the increasing evidence of a broadly based trend gathering momentum.
Which jobs in your company spend their days gathering, sorting and comparing information?
Sourcing coordinators comparing quotes.
Market researchers pulling sales figures.
Product managers reading competitor spec sheets.
Marketing staff turning those specs into copy.
None of this is exotic work. Most of it is the front end of a process where someone then makes a decision.
That front end is what VMN is hiring to automate, and the job titles that survive are the ones sitting after it.
For now.
Ironically the GBPI makes the point neatly.
The people it polls are purchasing managers, product managers and supply-chain managers, and in September it asked them how much they plan to invest in AI for procurement and sourcing. Bike Europe’s readers are being surveyed on the same question the publisher is answering for itself.
Three things to watch at Bike Europe over the next six months:
- Whether dedicated reporting capacity shrinks further.
- Whether a paid cycling-market data product launches.
- Whether coverage shifts from original reporting to analysis built from datasets.
Compare Bike Europe’s output before and after 25 September and that may well supply the answer.
The message to all workers in all verticals: read the job ads. When the vacancies start describing automation, data enrichment and “insights”, the org chart is already being redrawn.
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