Am I falling behind on AI?

You're just always on the road to become an expert. I've been in the e-commerce field for 20 years. I still don't consider myself an expert. AI came out, I wasn't an expert in AI, but I'm learning now.

Most of the rooms you're going to go into, probably 95% of the people there, maybe 98%, aren't even going to know a fingernail of what you know. They're busy running their business.

Let's say you put in a couple hours a day on learning this for a week. That's 10 hours. I guarantee you that's more than most people probably spent an entire year playing with it.

I first heard about crypto in 2011 and I ignored it. I heard about it again in 2014 and I ignored it. At the end of 2015, several of my friends were like, stop ignoring it. Within two years I took home $2,000,000 from consulting people about blockchain.

People now still don't know what the hell blockchain is. Even though I felt I was four or five years late, I was still 10 years earlier than everybody else.

Don't be in AI because it's a way to make money. Be in AI because you understand it and it's helped you in your life.

No need to destroy yourself. If the client is happy, that means you're doing a good job. If you're doing a good job, you're not being left behind.

But you have to stay with trends. My guess is that AI is going to be developing faster and faster, with more and more powerful tools every few months, never mind years.

There are different groups, podcasters and newsletters. You can subscribe to some of those, listen to them, read those. Specifically ones related to marketing and AI, for example, or to agentic AI within the marketing space.

I know a lot of people feel they should be doing something. Some are thinking maybe they should quit their job, or put their kids to bed and then stay up till 3 AM. It's kind of unhealthy.

I can't help thinking that sometimes things move much more slowly than we think. Probably education, actually: we've been promised revolutions for many, many years, and it hasn't really happened.

We were a bootstrapped company, and one of our most formidable competitors got loads of funding, did really well, then got bought up. Their product was just forgotten about. We were really slow and steady all the way along.

What I'm hearing is a constraint: you need to act now. What I'm not hearing is to solve what problem.

There's a lot of jargon and terms, and it's like everyone's doing something and we're not doing anything. Starting from all the tools that are there for marketeers, I think, creates a bit of moving too fast and losing control.

First, what is the problem we need to solve, given the constraint? Then you choose whether we can solve it this way or that way. Then it's what tools are available in the market to solve it that particular way.

Marketers by trade, by instinct, are people that are easily distracted by a new bright shiny thing. The one thing that's consistent in marketing is that everything's always changing.

I really strongly believe the principles of good marketing should be based on a fundamental understanding of human behaviour. It changes at a much slower rate than all of the technologies and the ways to reach people.

I feel like sometimes people think the strategies need to be fundamentally different. I would say it's more the tactics, with constant experimentation of new things. If you're going through existing piles of data to understand a customer, AI is super helpful.

You can literally ask ChatGPT for a crash course: what do I need to do? If it gives you a vague answer, tell it what you've been trying and that it's not working. It loves to talk.

With AI you can tell it, give me five options in different directions. It will give you the output in 2 minutes. Reading through is going to take maybe another 7 or 8 minutes. Then you shortlist and say, I want you to combine this concept and this concept. Within like 20 minutes you're done with a full day's work or a week's work.

Say AI is a box, the services that use AI are a box, and DevOps is the last box. Otherwise it will be a chaos.

DevOps is changing, but not as fast as AI. The services won't change as fast, because it takes time to build them and make them production ready. So the box that's changing is the AI.

The DevOps part, believe me, is not complicated. When you're in a stand-up and hear DevOps questions, write them down. Maybe someone technical should help you with a couple. I guarantee you that after 10 questions you'll at least be able to anchor yourself in that box.