There’s a viral post making the rounds right now. Matt Shumer, an AI startup founder, wrote a 5,000-word letter to his friends and family comparing the current state of AI to February 2020.
His central thesis: something big is happening, most people don’t see it coming. As an admitted technophile, I've been paying very close attention.
The article made its way into our team’s Slack this week. What followed was one of the most honest, unfiltered conversations we’ve had about what it actually feels like to work in marketing right now, at the intersection of human creativity and a technology that’s moving faster than anyone is fully comfortable admitting.
Here’s what we’re thinking:
Shumer’s post doesn’t sugarcoat it. AI’s ability to work autonomously is doubling roughly every four to seven months. A year ago, it could handle about ten minutes of independent work. Now it’s approaching five hours. And in what may be the most unsettling sentence in the whole piece, OpenAI’s latest model was partially instrumental in building itself. The feedback loop between current AI and next-generation AI, according to Anthropic’s own CEO, is already gathering steam.
I dropped the article into the team Slack with a “must read.” I'm genuinely excited by what AI can do, and also kind of wish, on some level, it had never existed. That tension is probably the most honest place any of us can occupy right now.
The Skeptics Have a Point and It’s a Good One
Not everyone on our team is boarding the hype train.
Janelle, our content director, came in with some fire. She pointed out that the entire narrative around AI adoption is engineered for urgency. Buy the premium subscription, get on board now or get left behind. Meanwhile, surveys of over 6,000 executives show more than 80% of companies report zero measurable productivity gains from AI investment so far. Brain scans on ChatGPT users show significantly reduced cognitive activity.
AI-generated content is quietly eroding the information ecosystem that marketers depend on every single day. “I’m not opposed to adopting AI where it makes sense,” she said. “But I think we all need to slow down and think about what we’re actually trying to achieve by using it.”
Mike echoed the sharpest concern in the whole thread: what we should be most worried about isn’t job loss. It’s the quiet outsourcing of our own thinking. When AI becomes your strategist, your first draft, and your therapist all at once, at some point you have to ask what exactly the human is doing anymore.
The Creative Soul Wants a Refund
Tara, who anchors our storytelling and PR work, put it in a way that stuck with everyone.
She wants her kids to know what typewriter keys feel like. She wants her muse to be a stranger she meets in line at a coffee shop, not a language model. She wants the mess and magic of the creative process, the dead ends, the happy accidents, the moments where something surprising happens because a human was fumbling through it with real skin in the game.
“If AI does all the work and our job is only to prompt it, we will find life extremely unfulfilling,” she said.
Her position isn’t anti-technology. It’s pro-human. The line she draws is one most of us quietly agree with: use AI to cure diseases, automate the tedious, free people up for the work that actually matters. But use it to replace the creative act itself? That’s where she gets off the bus, and honestly, she’s not wrong.
The Developer Is Skeptical
Chris, our lead developer, is skeptical of the hype, unimpressed by AI-generated CSS, and deeply suspicious of anyone trying to sell the idea that code slop and security vulnerabilities are a fair trade for a faster workflow.
High-maintenance clients and pixel-perfect design still require human taste, real craft, and someone willing to take accountability when things go sideways. The “AI will handle your dev work” promise lands very differently when you’re the one fielding the client call at 9pm.
But even he said it: "don’t sleep on it. Pay attention. Just don’t let it take what gives you purpose and expect you to be cheerful about it." That’s real talk.
Here’s What Nobody in the Viral Posts Is Talking About
There’s a conversation happening underneath all the AI noise and it’s the one that actually matters for marketers and the businesses they serve.
If AI is getting better at execution, at writing, designing, coding, synthesizing, then the thing that becomes more valuable is the thinking that happens before any of that. The strategy. The positioning. The deeply human work of figuring out who you are, who you’re talking to, what you actually stand for, and why anyone should care.
Most organizations haven’t done that work. Not really. Ask ten employees why their company exists and you’ll get ten different answers. That was a problem before AI. In a world where everyone has access to the same generative tools, it’s becoming a crisis.
This is exactly why services built around human-led strategic thinking aren’t becoming less relevant in the AI era. They’re becoming the whole game.
We’ve been building two service offerings that feel more timely now than when we designed them.
The first is reVAMP, an interactive brand messaging process that digs into the five areas where most companies’ communications quietly fall apart:
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How your audience responds to your brand
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The values and differentiators that actually set you apart
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A clear profile of who your audience is and what will resonate with them
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The tone and voice your messaging should carry
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Your position in the market relative to competitors
The output is a comprehensive messaging guide covering brand archetype, key differentiators, elevator pitch, tagline, content pillars and more. A complete blueprint for how your organization should sound and what it should say.
The second is StoryCrafting, built on over two decades of storytelling expertise. At the heart of it is a deceptively simple question: if you asked every person in your company why your organization exists, would you get the same answer?
StoryCrafting is the process of uncovering your Capital S Story, the authentic, emotionally resonant narrative that answers Why someone should:
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Buy from you
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Work for you
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Invest in you
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Partner with you
It goes deep: stakeholder interviews, competitor analysis, archetype identification, story anchors, key message frameworks, audience personas.
Neither of these is something AI can do for you. AI can assist, synthesize, and accelerate pieces of the process. But the strategic thinking, the human conversations, the discovery work, that requires experience, judgment, and the ability to sit across from your leadership team and ask the questions they haven’t thought to ask themselves yet.
And here’s where it gets interesting from an AI standpoint: the output of both services, the messaging guides, the brand frameworks, the story architecture, becomes extraordinarily powerful raw material for AI tools.
When your organization has a clear, documented voice and a well-defined message, you’re not just getting better marketing. You’re building the training input that makes every AI-assisted content effort sharper, more consistent, and more on-brand. It’s the difference between AI producing something generic and AI producing something that actually sounds like you.
The wave is real. The pace is real. And the organizations that come out the other side will be the ones that invested in their foundational thinking before handing the keys to the machine.
We’re not here to tell you AI is going to save your business or that you’re doomed if you don’t act now. We’re here to help you figure out what actually makes sense for yours, whether that’s implementing a custom AI chat agent or voice agent that reflects your brand and handles real customer interactions, developing the messaging framework that makes all of your AI-assisted content sharper, or simply thinking through where the human touch still matters most in your marketing.
The agencies and partners worth betting on right now aren’t the ones racing to replace their teams with prompts. They’re the ones who understand that the most powerful thing you can feed an AI is a clear, human-built strategy, and who can help you build it.
That’s a human job. We’re pretty good at it.
