Are We Just Looking for the Silver Bullet That Makes Working Obsolete?

I'll admit it. I go down the AI hole (that shouldn't be what it's called!) looking for ways to beat the system - reduce work - reach some sort of automated bliss where my creativity can finally blossom and I still get paid!

I snap out of it and refocus on one of the countless webinars featuring marketers who are spinning wildly down their own AI hole or, in other words, at the leading edge of AI use.

They use it for market research. Competitor research. Prospecting. Content creation. Reporting. Email summaries. Meeting summaries. They dump more information into GitHub.

“Wait, you don’t use GitHub?” says the admittedly savvier and more interesting marketer giving the presentation.

Meanwhile, inside my head: I don't use GitHub. What sort of marketer am I? A boomer or something?

I digress.

Then come the AI agents and the revolution they will marshal in.

An agent summarizes your inbox. Another summarizes your meetings. Another researches your competitors while you sleep. Another updates your CRM. Another writes the first draft - scratch that the final draft and we just pretend that we vetted it because guess what? I have an agent that vets the articles and runs them through editorial! Another turns the first piece of content into twelve social posts all perfectly scheduled and orchestrated for maximum impact!

The webinar marketer sprays all this faster than I can stir the milk in my Ceylon tea. And the optimization stories are always impressive.

“I took this task that used to take me five minutes every day and reduced it to one second.”

Fancy, right?

But I keep wondering: what exactly are we optimizing toward?

We’ve heard some version of this promise for decades. Outsourcing was going to free us up to “focus on the business.” SaaS was going to free us up to “focus on the business.” Automation was going to free us up to “focus on the business.”

Now AI is finally going to free us up to focus on the business.

Apparently we have been seconds away from focusing on the business for the better part of a century.

And maybe that five-minute task really is pointless. Plenty of work is. "Agent it away," I say! If software can eliminate repetitive data entry, fantastic. If an AI system can configure 200 workstations consistently instead of having a technician click through the same steps 200 times, even better.

But what if you’re a marketer and those five minutes actually are focusing on the business?

What if reading what competitors are saying is part of the work?

What if digging around in customer questions is part of the work?

What if sitting with an idea, writing something badly, rewriting it, noticing something strange, talking to a salesperson, reading three customer emails and suddenly seeing a connection is part of the work?

At some point there is a difference between removing friction from the work and removing yourself from the work.

I’m increasingly interested in that line.

So What Happens When We Optimize Everything?

Let’s imagine you really succeed.

Your inbox is summarized.

Your meetings are summarized.

Your research is summarized.

Your competitors are summarized.

Your articles are drafted.

Your social posts are scheduled.

Your outreach is automated.

You have optimized your entire working life down to three point three minutes per day that are actually "work".

Congratulations!

Now what?

Presumably you take on more clients.

Then you optimize those.

Then you take on more clients.

Then perhaps you hire fewer people because the agents are doing so much work.

Then you optimize some more.

I guess that is the game. Did I just pretty much summarize capitalism - once again no great insight here Brandon!

There’s something slightly strange about technologies that are constantly marketed as giving us our time back, while almost every economic incentive encourages us to immediately fill that time with more work.

And there is another uncomfortable part of this race.

We spend a lot of time looking downward for tasks and people we can eliminate.

Can AI replace the junior marketer?

Can it handle Tier 1 support?

Can it eliminate the coordinator?

Can it reduce the number of writers we need?

Can we manage twice as many accounts with the same team?

Fair questions.

But look up or sideways or wherever, just look!

Is somebody paying you money?

There’s a decent chance they’re attending a webinar about how AI can eliminate you.

Not All Optimization Is Equal

This isn’t an argument for becoming a Luddite - though I certainly can feel myself slipping in that direction.

I use AI constantly. I think some of this technology is incredibly dangerous and some of it is benign and some of it is everything in between.

And there are areas where failing to automate probably does mean getting left behind.

If you’re running a factory and your competitors can make the same product faster, cheaper and more reliably, you probably need to keep up.

If you’re deploying computers, monitoring networks, processing tickets, collecting data, updating software or performing other repeatable processes, automation can be an enormous advantage.

Even in marketing there are plenty of things I’m happy to automate.

SEO research.

Website updates.

Formatting.

Data analysis.

Competitor monitoring.

Pulling together information that would otherwise require mindless clicking between twenty tabs.

The mistake is assuming that because optimization works incredibly well in one kind of work, it must work equally well everywhere.

Marketing has a problem that a factory doesn’t.

If you discover a better way to attach a door to a car, the technique doesn’t suddenly stop working because every other manufacturer adopts it.

Marketing tactics can absolutely lose their effectiveness as others jump on board and deploy the same tactics.

The Problem With Everyone Having the Same Machine

Marketing is partly about getting attention.

And attention is relative.

Let’s say AI makes cold outreach dramatically easier.

You can now research a prospect automatically, reference their company, personalize the message and send hundreds or thousands of emails that look like someone spent considerable time preparing them.

That sounds like an incredible advantage.

And maybe it is.

Until everyone does it.

Then your customer opens their inbox and sees fifty thoughtful, highly personalized messages produced by fifty different AI systems.

At that point the personalization itself stops being remarkable.

It becomes noise.

The same thing already happened with content.

AI made it unbelievably cheap to create reasonably coherent articles.

So companies created reasonably coherent articles.

Then they created more reasonably coherent articles.

Then everyone created more reasonably coherent articles.

The technology worked perfectly.

The strategy stopped working.

The tool did exactly what we asked it to do. The problem was that everyone else got the same tool.

Success caused adoption.

Adoption caused saturation.

Saturation reduced the value of the thing we had just optimized.

That dynamic seems especially important in marketing because so much of marketing depends on not looking exactly like everyone else. Say it with me...DIFFERENTIATOR.

Maybe Inefficiency Becomes an Advantage

As a believer in "the middle way", this is where I think taking a nuanced approach to marketing can get interesting and probably produce better results.

What happens when everyone has access to essentially the same optimization machine?

Maybe the contrarian, or a balanced move starts making sense.

On the one hand use AI to identify 100 possible prospects, and on the other hand actually spend time understanding the five that matter.

Automate the website update, but write the important article slowly.

Have AI summarize the customer surveys, but take the time to actually read what the customers actually wrote.

Use agents to eliminate the administrative garbage surrounding creative work, while being careful not to automate away the part where you think critically.

Maybe the future isn’t human versus AI.

Maybe it’s knowing when to use the machine and when deliberately not to use it.

That sounds almost ridiculous in an environment where optimization itself has become a virtue.

Why would you spend two hours doing something an AI could accomplish in five minutes?

Sometimes you shouldn’t.

But sometimes the two hours are where you develop taste, intuition, and that rare spark of insight.

Where you notice the weird thing.

Where you change your mind.

Where you understand the customer.

Where you come up with something that isn’t the average of everything everyone else has already done.

I believe this will prove especially valuable as the internet continues filling server after server with perfectly optimized average work.

The Silver Bullet

I think that’s what bothers me about so much of the current AI conversation.

Everyone seems to be hunting for the silver bullet.

The agent that eliminates the writer.

The system that eliminates the salesperson.

The automation that eliminates the technician.

The platform that eliminates the agency.

The workflow that finally gets rid of all this annoying work.

Some of those bullets are real.

Some of them will dramatically change businesses, probably for the better!

But if your primary AI strategy is figuring out how to eliminate everyone below you, it might be worth remembering that someone above you is probably searching for their own silver bullet.

So yes, optimize.

Automate and put those agents to work!

Use the tools.

Take advantage of what is genuinely better.

My guess/hope is that, in marketing especially, there may come a point where judgment, attention, taste, curiosity and actual human involvement become more valuable precisely because they are difficult to optimize.

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