Surviving the Shift - The AI blues

If you’ve been in marketing for a decade or two you’ve already survived big shifts: desktop to mobile-first, mass media to targeted advertising, outbound marketing to inbound marketing, etc.

Each shift shook up how you market, but AI is starting to change who can do the work, how fast it gets done, and what skills actually matter.

And this shift is dramatically faster. Faster in a way that makes you question whether your brain is still running the current version of the operating system. You get comfortable with a tool and, two days later, it feels like you’re explaining Myspace to a teenager.

This creates the illusion that everyone else is up to speed and you’re lagging behind.

Execution used to be the edge. If you could actually do the work -- write, design, build -- you stood out. Now “pretty good” is everywhere. It’s like decent coffee: once rare, now unavoidable.

And that’s a strange thing to watch if you spent years honing your craft. There’s no ceremony when a skill loses leverage. Experience still matters, just less. You’re not automatically ahead … you’re just earlier, trying to update your skills without discarding the parts that still work (taste, judgment and deciding what’s worth doing in the first place).

All this logically leads to compression: fewer people doing more … value clustering around the people who can aim all this capability in the right direction.

Which leaves us in an odd spot today. Still expected to perform while the ground shifts under our feet like a treadmill that occasionally changes speed just to keep things interesting.

Maybe I’m overthinking it. Wouldn’t be the first time.

Or maybe this is just what it feels like to go through a major shift while still being expected to hit deadlines and sound like you know what you’re doing.

Probably both.

The only thing I’m reasonably confident about is that the advantage is moving. Away from grinding, toward choosing. Away from doing, toward deciding.