My Take on AI vs AL
There’s artificial intelligence (AI) and what I call analog intelligence (AL). Here’s how I’m optimizing both in this new era.
I’m optimistically embracing AI. But I’m measured in how I use it, recognizing the lasting power of human-forward marketing and communications.
I don’t shy away from the change that’s coming. I follow newsletters that review new tools. To get inspiration and ideas, I’ve trained my social media algorithms to surface posts about how people use these tools.
I test some. I keep what works. But use it only where it makes sense and doesn’t harm the quality of the work.
My thesis is that we’re living through our own version of the industrial revolution.
Nothing will be the same on the other end of this.
But here’s what I think most people are missing …
The conversation is often framed around embracing the change or getting left behind.
If you look closer, there’s a third way emerging. As AI proliferates, people will increasingly value and crave fully human interactions, products, and services.
In the same way that we see “Made in Australia” marketing, so too will it soon be common to see phrases like “Made by Humans” or “Message from a Human.”
The more AI grows, the more customers will year for authentic human experiences.
Yet, the better AI gets, the greater the expectation that publicly traded companies will go deeper into it to boost share prices.
That will create a wonderful opportunity for niche and local businesses to thrive.
The savviest marketers will see this trend and adapt.
How I Actually Use It
As a strategic thinking partner. I use Claude the way some people use a whiteboard — to pressure-test ideas, map out strategy, and find holes in my thinking before I launch into action.
Building systems faster. I recently used Claude Code to build a customer-facing address lookup tool and an internal zone management system. What would have taken a month to find a developer and get to a finished product took me a day.
Research and pattern recognition. I’ve set up recurring checks on competitors, Google/AI search ranking, and marketing metrics reports. AI compresses weeks of research into hours. But the insight still has to come from someone who knows what they're looking at.
Voice-to-text workflows. Using Wispr Flow, I do a lot of speaking instead of typing across almost everything on my computer. I’ve probably saved 10-20% on time, depending on the task.
Content collaboration, not content generation. I think of it like a session musician who plays what you ask for, but you're still producing the track. I write. AI edits. Or I give AI a direction, and it drafts. Then I rewrite until it sounds like me. The output is mine — the process just got faster.
Where I Draw the Line
AI shouldn't replace the thing people are actually buying. If a customer is hiring me for my thinking, my taste, or my creative judgment — handing that to a machine defeats the purpose. AI is the scaffolding, not the building.
Faking the human parts. AI-generated reviews, AI-written messages pretending to be personal, AI video passed off as real footage — anything that asks the audience to believe a human did something that a machine actually did. That's not efficiency. That's erosion of trust.
Thin content that exists only to game an algorithm. I'd rather publish one piece that actually helps someone than ten that exist to boost a ranking.