The Horse Runs Wildly Toward Something Spectacular

Everyone is talking about how AI is changing the way we work. How it's democratizing our capabilities. How those who are harnessing AI  will win the day.

I also see an inversion of this concept in the hands of creatives, in my own hands, actually.

What happens when a whirling dervish creative mind is harnessed by AI?

Ugh. Again.

The creative industry has been here before. Every major digital innovation — software, the internet, the cloud, AI — arrived with the same promise and the same temptation. You can do more. You can do it faster. You can fill every channel.

And every time, a significant portion of the business world took the bait. Not out of laziness, and not out of bad intentions. But because speed and volume feel like progress. Because clients ask for it. Because the short-term metrics reward it.

The result, over and over, has been creative work designed to be consumed and forgotten. Content that fills feeds but doesn't build anything. Campaigns that launch and disappear. Brands that spend years producing output without ever building a real relationship with their audience.

The truth is, you’re never going to build what matters, what endures, when you’re using any kind of technology to expel half-assed concepts on the rest of us.

AI is the latest chapter in this story. And some of the people using it are writing the same ending.

That part bothers me.  This dynamic is getting old, and I’m old enough to have seen this rerun a few times. Many of us notice all of the AI slop that’s out there in social media, advertising, and other content forms. It’s gross, but it’s not any more or less gross than, say, website content written for Google spiders without a thought given to the human eyes who follow the spider-driven algorithm to the site. That’s been around for years. AI is just making it easier to do more of it, faster.

Mind Travels with AI

Here's what I know about meaningful creative work: it requires going places that are inconvenient. Turning over stones that don't obviously need to be turned. Sitting with a brand, an idea, or a community long enough to understand not just what it needs to say, but what it needs to be.

That kind of work has always been slow in the ways that matter — not in production, but in depth. Thinking takes time. The questions take time. The willingness to keep asking when the first answer is good enough takes discipline.

I've spent my career doing this work — for brands, for cultural institutions, for nonprofits serving communities that are too often underserved. And what I've found, consistently, is that the organizations that build something lasting are the ones willing to go deep before going wide.

The ones chasing volume rarely get there.

I use AI. I use it every day, and I use it in ways that have genuinely changed what I'm capable of producing.

But not in the way most people mean when they say that.

I'm not using it to generate faster. I'm not feeding it a brief and shipping the output. That approach produces exactly what the industry is already drowning in: more content, less substance.

What I've found is something different. Something that took me a while to understand about myself.

I am, by nature, a hypercreative thinker. My mind generates ideas in multiple directions at once, makes unexpected connections, chases threads that don't seem related until they suddenly are. That is both a gift and, without structure, a liability. Ideas tend to scatter, sometimes left forgotten. Coverage is uneven. The brilliant insight in one direction can come at the expense of the obvious one I missed somewhere else.

Properly Bridled, The Creative Thoroughbred Runs Toward the Spectacular

AI, used intentionally in the hands of the creative professional, functions as a harness.

Not to slow me down in the diminishing sense — but in the way a well-designed system channels energy rather than dissipates it. I can think at full speed. I can generate wildly. And AI helps me ensure that nothing is left uncovered, no stone unturned, no channel or angle or audience consideration missed.

The result is creative work that is more thorough than what I would produce alone. Brand foundations that go deeper. Strategic frameworks with fewer gaps. Playbooks built to cover how brands actually grow — across channels, across audiences, across time.

The creative thoroughbred horse, now properly bridled with AI, runs with wild abandon toward something spectacular.

The Crux: Creating vs Building

This is the distinction I keep coming back to: the difference between creating and building.

Creating is producing something. Building is constructing something that lasts — something with architecture, with purpose, with the structural integrity to hold up as conditions change.

A brand built on real understanding of its audience can weather market shifts. A cultural project rooted in genuine community connection creates something that outlives the event. A piece of art or literature that is made with depth and intention keeps giving long after its release.

None of that comes from optimizing for speed. None of it comes from filling channels. It comes from caring about what you're actually building — and being willing to do the work, with whatever tools are available, to build it right.

AI can serve that. Used with intention, it can make the deep work more complete, more considered, more thorough than any one creative mind working alone could manage.

Or it can produce a lot of content very quickly.

The tool is the same. The orientation is everything.

When We Do It Right, More and More of Us Win in the Long Term

I've been spending time lately developing what I believe are some of the most advanced brand playbooks available to small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits — organizations that have historically had to choose between thoughtful strategy and affordable execution.

That gap has always troubled me. The organizations serving underserved communities, doing meaningful cultural work, building things that genuinely matter — they've been priced out of the kind of strategic depth that larger institutions take for granted.

AI, used the way I'm using it, starts to close that gap. Not by cheapening the work, but by making thoroughness achievable at a scale that wasn't possible before.

That's the version of this story I want to be part of. The one where the technology makes enduring creative work more accessible — not where it makes disposable content more abundant. Real human connection is what drives this world, whether it’s the creation of art, a cultural event, or just people buying stuff.

The question isn't whether to use AI.

The question is what you're building with it.

Build something that matters, build something that lasts.