Fast + Light

AI's taking center stage. Still doesn't beat sitting across the table from great people. Had hangs with agency owners last night. No one's ready. We'll be fine. We're not in the AI business. We're in the business of helping businesses move forward. LFG.

Lunch yesterday with Tiffanie and Heidi at Hanley Investment Group. Hadn't even cracked the menu. Tiffanie was already breaking down the parade of AI vendors pitching her.

"Every product I test is great at one specific process. But we don't follow that process. So either I adapt to the tool, or I have a useless tool."

She's stopped chasing pitches. Building scripts on her own now. Mostly from scratch.

Most of what's getting sold right now is trash. Lead generators. Universal AI assistants. An "AI layer" on the SaaS you already pay for. Stack it all. Then add governance. Then add a BI tool that reads the AI output. Every layer wants more money.

The pitch is always "we'll save you time." The reality is you spend three weeks unwinding the assumptions baked into someone else's product and end up back where you started.

It hit me halfway through the french dip. Tiffanie isn't behind on AI. She's ahead of it. She's stopped buying solutions and started solving.

The shift isn't that it's easy. It's that the work is finally yours. You swap a $40,000 vendor contract for the time it takes to know your own operation cold. Most teams won't make that trade. That's the opportunity we didn’t have a year ago.

Bespoke is back. It's just yours to build now.

Found the entire sales playbook stenciled on a bench in San Diego.

Yes, I know what the bench is actually about. We're not going there.

But "Respect the signals. Ask for consent." is also the exact playbook I wish more people in this business ran.

What most are doing instead: scrape a list. Auto-personalize. Pitch slap. Book the call. Run the deck. Move on.

Try any of that on a first date and let me know how it goes.

Slower way. Meet people where they are. Hear what they're working on, what they're stuck on, what they actually want. Help them. Learn something from them.

Then, if it makes sense, ask if they'd want to hear what you do.

In the moment, the bench was just a funny thing to point at.

Looking back, might be the sharpest sales advice I've ever seen on a piece of public furniture.

You shouldn't kiss people without asking. Don't pitch them like that either.

Coffee with Michael Forte at Bird Rock Roasters last week in San Diego. We worked together at Nero years ago. Reconnected recently and have a couple projects going.

Grabbed coffee, took a walk, talked about a bunch of stuff.

One thing kept coming back. How many brands and people are sitting on the sidelines, waiting for AI to settle down. Waiting for normal.

Nothing is normal. Nothing's going to be normal for quite a while.

In the moment I just thought it was the same conversation everyone's been having.

Looking back, the part that stuck was the cost of waiting. The opportunity exists right now because the outcomes aren't known yet. Room to try things, fail, rebuild, find the weird little edge that wasn't there a year ago.

The people waiting for things to settle may as well start filling out the UBI paperwork. There's going to be a lot of opportunity. Just not for everyone who waits.

Move fast. Break some things. Don't forget to enjoy yourself while you're doing it.

This moment is the only one we actually get. Everything else is a story from the past or one of a million possible futures.