Something incredible happened in 2023. The most powerful creative and analytical tool in human history became available to everyone for $20 a month. And what did the marketing industry do with it?
The result: slop. Spectacular amounts of slop. Blog posts that read like a Wikipedia article had a baby with a fortune cookie. Social media captions that all somehow end with “What do you think? Drop a comment below!” LinkedIn posts that open with “I never thought I’d say this, but…” and then say absolutely nothing. Ad copy so generic it could sell anything, which means it sells nothing. Websites where every headline is “Empowering Your Journey to Success” and every subhead is “Leverage AI-Powered Solutions for Tomorrow’s Challenges.”
The piano isn’t the problem.
The piano is incredible.
The problem is that most people sitting at it have never learned to play. They don’t know what sounds good. They can’t hear when something’s off key. They just know the keys make noise when you press them, and pressing more keys faster must mean you’re getting better.
AI didn’t make marketing worse. It made bad marketing faster. The people who didn’t know what they were doing before ChatGPT still don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve just automated the production of mediocrity. Scaled it. Put it on a schedule. And they’re standing in the middle of the content flood they created wondering why none of it’s working.
When everyone is producing the same AI-generated mush, standing out requires exactly one thing: someone who knew what good marketing looked like before the robots showed up. Someone who’s been writing headlines, building brands, designing campaigns, and reading analytics for long enough that they can tell the difference between “the AI generated this” and “this is actually good.” The machines do everything now. The human decides what’s worth doing. That skill, taste plus experience plus judgment applied to AI output, is now the scarcest, most valuable capability in marketing.
I’ve been doing every job in marketing for 30 years. I’ve built brands. Run performance campaigns. Written ads that sold things. Designed sites that moved conversion numbers. Read analytics dashboards and known what to do next. AI doesn’t replace any of those skills. It makes all of them faster. That’s why one person with three decades of experience and genuine AI fluency is more dangerous than a 15-person agency that just added “AI-powered” to their pitch deck.
I’m in the top 0.1% of ChatGPT users. But that’s not even my primary tool anymore. I’m working with platforms and workflows most marketers won’t hear about for another year. I also produced an entire AI-generated sketch comedy series, which is either the most impressive or the most concerning thing on this website depending on how you feel about the future.
I don’t consult about AI. I don’t send you articles about what’s possible. I don’t attend your all-hands and give a talk about “the future of work” while your team nods politely and goes back to doing everything the same way. I build systems with AI and deploy them inside your business. Today. This week.
CREATIVE PRODUCTION SYSTEMS: The typical marketing team produces 5-10 ad variants a month and calls it a “test.” I build systems that produce 20-50, with AI generating the volume and human creative direction ensuring quality. Behind the curtain, I’m running custom GPTs interfacing with each other like a creative Rube Goldberg machine. Agents talking to agents. Outputs feeding into rewrites feeding into hand-edits feeding into more prompts feeding into something that actually sounds like it came from a human who gives a damn. I’m not typing “MAKE GOOD MARKETING” and hoping for the best. I’m conducting an orchestra of specialized instruments, each tuned for a specific purpose, then editing note by note until it sounds like music instead of noise.
CUSTOM AI TOOLS: I build GPTs and AI workflows that encode your institutional knowledge. Your brand voice, your positioning, your product language, your customer objections, your competitive landscape. These aren’t chatbots. They’re strategic tools that let anyone on your team produce on-brand work without the three-week creative review process. Think of it as bottling your best marketer’s brain and making it available to everyone at 2am when the actual marketer is asleep.
TEAM TRAINING: Most AI training is “here’s how to write a prompt.” That’s like teaching someone to play piano by showing them where middle C is. My training is “here’s how to think about what you’re asking for, evaluate what you get back, and know when the AI is wrong.” I’m also an improv teacher, which means I understand how humans actually adopt new tools: through practice, play, and immediate application, not 80 slides and a follow-up email that nobody reads.
CONTENT AND DISCOVERY STRATEGY: Search is no longer just Google. In 2026, people discover brands through Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, AI recommendation engines, and browser-integrated AI summaries that are already changing how people find things before they click. I build content strategies optimized for discovery everywhere. And here’s the part most people haven’t figured out yet: early category definition matters. If your brand becomes the default answer inside AI-driven recommendation engines, that’s a moat your competitors can’t easily replicate. The brands building topical authority now are the ones the algorithms will recommend later.
My proof of concept. An entirely AI-produced sketch comedy series: writing, image generation, voice acting, editing, post-production. All AI. All directed by a human with 30 years of creative direction and a background in stand-up comedy and improv. The gap between “AI generated this” and “this is actually good” is exactly where my value lives. If I can make a comedy series with these tools, imagine what I can do with your marketing.
AI-powered brand extraction tool I built and shipped. What used to take agencies weeks, done in a session. [Try it]
It doesn’t mean buying more tools. Most companies have too many tools and not enough taste. The tool was never the talent.
It doesn’t mean hiring an AI consultant who sends you articles about what’s possible. You don’t need someone to tell you AI is important. You need someone to build the thing. There’s a difference between understanding that pianos exist and being able to play one.
It means having one person who understands marketing deeply enough to know where AI creates real leverage, and who can build and deploy those systems personally. Not advise on them. Build them. Ship them. Measure them. Iterate on them. This morning.
The gatekeepers didn’t lose their jobs. They lost their monopoly. You used to need a massive agency with floors full of specialists to do big things. Now anyone with taste, vision, and the right tools can do big things. The question is whether that person is you, someone you hire, or nobody, in which case your competitors are pulling ahead by a margin that widens every week.
The people who can’t adapt can join the vinyl purists, arguing about warmth and authenticity while the rest of us stream the future. They’re not wrong about warmth. But warmth was never the point. The work was always the point.
