I kept meeting brilliant marketers who felt a step behind on AI. It bothered me, because they are not behind at all. This is the honest story of what I did about it.
An open notebook
For a stretch this summer, work slowed right down and I had more time on my hands than I am used to. You can wait out a gap like that, or you can use it. I used it, on one question I could not put down. How should marketers actually be using AI. Not the caption trick everyone already knows. The real thing.
In the first week I caught myself doing the exact thing that had been bothering me about everyone else. I opened AI to write a caption faster.
The most powerful tool of my career, pointed at the smallest task on my list.
We were hired to think. We have finally been handed something that could give that back, and most of us are using it to get a little quicker at the work that was already burying us.
I read everything I could find on how marketing teams really use AI, and the numbers are uncomfortable.
The reason is not the technology. It is that nobody trained us. Most employers hand their people a login and call it a strategy, and almost no one gets taught prompting, the one skill that decides whether the output is sharp or generic. So the work starts to sound the same, brands go invisible, and the people coming up behind us learn the surface while the depth quietly disappears. It was never a tool problem. It is a thinking, training and leadership problem. That is the part I wanted to work on.
I should be honest about how this went. I am a brand person, not a developer or a designer. I taught myself the tools as I went, Claude, Perplexity and a few others, mostly by getting it wrong and going again. When I let the AI lead, it gave me slop, empty copy that sounded like every other brand online. When I asked it how to launch, it handed me fake urgency I nearly used. When I made the brand's images, it gave me a different face every time.
None of that was in a guide. I just kept hitting the wall and asking why, until a way of working showed up.
But the real shift was smaller than any of that. It was the questions. The good work never came from a better tool. It came from a better question. The three things I have always cared about turned out to be sitting right there in how you use it.
AI does not replace any of it. It rewards whoever brings it, and exposes whoever does not.
What came out of it is not a finished product. It is a set of prompt packs for the places brand and marketing work actually gets stuck, and a simple place to keep them. The value was never the AI. It is the thinking built into it, so the person using it makes a better call, not just a faster caption.
I am not claiming I cracked anything. This is one marketer working it out in the open, asking a lot of questions and getting plenty wrong. The packs will change. Some of it I will pull apart and rebuild. But the reason underneath it will not move. Help marketers use AI to take the weight off the week, think better, and bring their teams up, the ones coming up behind us most of all. Brand, leadership and coaching, with AI as the multiplier.
This is less a launch than an open notebook, and I would rather build it with the people it is for than at them. If any of this feels familiar, start where I did. The free packs are there whenever you want them. And I am genuinely curious. Where are you with AI right now, honestly?