Topic
AI, and what it’s actually doing
Most writing about AI is either a sales pitch or a eulogy. This is neither. It’s about what the technology is actually doing to industries and to the people who work in them: who wins, who gets quietly replaced, and what it means for the teams in the middle.
The future is being built by the people coding it, for the people coding it. The rest of us need to catch up before we’re the ones being automated.
The $29 cap on the tool that was working
Accenture has capped staff Claude spend at $29 a month. Meta and Microsoft are rationing too. The firms selling AI transformation hit the bit nobody budgets for.The robo boss now needs a witness
California has banned sacking people on an algorithm alone. A human has to check the work first. Most agencies already run a robo boss: the utilisation report.Questions I get asked
- Is AI going to replace marketing jobs?
- Some of them, and sooner at the junior end than most agencies admit. The work that goes first is the work nobody wrote down as a decision: reporting, first drafts, trafficking. The work that stays is choosing what to say to whom, and that was always the scarce bit.
- How should an agency roll out AI tools?
- Decide what stops being done if it works, put a date on it, and go and sit with the people using the tools most. A pilot with no definition of success becomes a hobby with a budget line. A flat cost cap before anyone has measured output stops the only experiment that was working.
- Should clients be told when AI was used on their work?
- Yes, before they find out. The problem was never the tool, it is the person who discovers it second-hand. Say what was generated, what was checked and by whom, and most clients care less than you fear. Hide it and it becomes the whole story.