(From my Marketing Week column).

“Your package was shipped: 1 Nutrition & Wellness, 1 Wireless Accessories.” Some Amazon customers are wondering why their confirmation emails suddenly read weird. Didn’t I order one shampoo and one USB charger? It’s a sign of things to come. Asked about the change, Amazon told a US reporter: “This also reduces customer information shared outside the Amazon app and website to further improve customer privacy.”

When big tech suddenly discovers “customer privacy”, it’s worth digging in.

Amazon has good reason to “protect” its customer data. AI is beginning to squeeze itself between brands and customers. The more data AI systems gather, the easier it becomes for them to advise customers on what to buy—and eventually make the purchase decision.

AI decision making sounds futuristic. It isn’t. Gemini Spark, Google’s personal AI agent, can scrape information from Gmail and other Google services to, for example, compile itineraries and build trips. In May, Google unveiled a “Universal Cart” that works across Google apps. Nike, Sephora, Target, Walmart, Wayfair and others have signed up. Amazon, notably, hasn’t.

For customers, the attraction of an AI interface is obvious. Let the system deal with your purchase of “four packs of kitchen towels on promotion.” Fine. Let it find your favorite holiday package cheaper. Even better. Customers like things to be easy. DoorDash and Deliveroo have already made shopping easier. If AI removes another step, consumers will use it.

For brands, an AI intermediary could range from a business accelerator to a complete disaster.

Brands have always had intermediaries. Most consumer brands never enjoyed much of a direct customer relationship in the first place. People buy juice and diapers through retailers, physical or online. Brands create consumer pull through advertising and retailer push through promotions. It’s „pay for salience“. Service brands have traditionally been closer to customers. Take travel. Traditionally, people booked holidays through an agent. Digital allowed the best travel firms build even stronger customer relationships and get people to book before they shop around. Others ended up paying Google and TikTok ever larger sums to send customers to their websites.

Now a new intermediary is arriving. If AI starts buying, recommending and assembling products for us, brands and retailers enter a different marketing game. Strong brands should have an advantage. So should those with excellent direct customer relationships. Everyone else risks becoming a row in a comparison table: “sort by price.”

B2B isn’t immune. Historically, long negotiation cycles and complicated contracts made great salespeople enormously valuable. Digital already made suppliers easier to find and compare. Now imagine AI running much of the procurement process. If AI systems are good at anything, it’s digesting complicated problems, comparing options and checking complicated contracts.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question. Will AI turn the customer interface into something brands eventually have to pay for? There’s a very large reason to think it will. Money.

Current AI revenues don’t remotely justify the capital being invested. Infrastructure spending by the biggest US tech firms is projected to rise from roughly $450 billion in 2025 to around $1.4 trillion in 2027. The Economist has calculated that covering AI capital expenditure would require annual AI revenues on the order of $2.5 trillion. That’s more than the entire tech industry generates today.

Meanwhile, CEOs aren’t yet seeing AI productivity gains at scale. Some companies are even cutting back on AI spend. Microsoft is now cracking down on token overuse among its own staff. And most consumers still use AI for free. Wonderful technology. Terrible economics.

Someone has to pay.

For AI firms, finding much larger sources of revenue is becoming existential. Google became the world’s largest advertising business after discovering how valuable control of the consumer interface could be. AI may be about to discover exactly the same thing. Once AI systems begin influencing which products consumers see, compare and ultimately buy, that access becomes extremely valuable.

Monetization is already happening. 200 days after introducing ads, Open AI just reported 1bn US$ Chat GPT advertising revenue. A press release hints at more: „Our next phase of growth will bring ChatGPT Ads to more markets and introduce additional formats, objectives, buying options, and measurement capabilities.” Gemini is experimenting with AI shopping. Anthropic has told the world during the Super Bowl that Claude will remain ad-free. But ad-free doesn’t mean monetization-free. There are other ways to charge brands for access, transactions, services, or placement.

Yet many executives are looking in the wrong direction. Around the world, they are flocking to AI tool courses just as they flocked to digital tool courses twenty years ago. Everyone worries about AI replacing basic activities such as Seach Machine Optimization (SEO) or social media campaigning (it probably will). And everyone wants to become an expert in the new tools.

There’s much bigger question: when machines squeeze between us and our customers, how do we maintain those relationships? When the machine recommends, how do we become the brand people still want?

Executives need to step back from the tools and start doing their actual job. Help the organization work out how to thrive in an AI-mediated world. Decide where AI intermediaries can help the business, where the direct customer relationship must be protected, and where the company risks becoming interchangeable.

Knowing AI tools is tactics.
Knowing how to win as AI changes the game is strategy.

Next week, we’ll kick off our 15th Marketing Leadership Masterclass. We have a few seats left for individual learners…

Few courses teach people how to mobilize senior leaders and people across an organization to create growth. That is what the Marketing Leadership Masterclass is about. Not another collection of clever frameworks. Practical tools to turn ideas into impact.

We’ll run another 12-week online sprint. People work as a community, debating real issues and solving problems together.

Our brilliant mentors make the experience special: top marketers who contribute alongside demanding day jobs.

Take a look at the details at marketingleadershipmasterclass.com. Or message Olli at learn@marketingleader.com.

Sony didn’t invent the PlayStation. Ken Kutaragi did. 3M didn’t invent the Post-it Note. Scientists Spencer Silver and Art Fry did. Google didn’t invent Gmail. Paul Buchheit did.

Companies don’t create growth. People do.

For decades, companies relied on a proven growth playbook: top-down management. Bestsellers like In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, and Good to Great had a comforting promise: leaders can build companies and steer growth top-down with clever strategies and replicable processes.

Unfortunately, in the decades after publication, the companies celebrated in these books barely outperformed the market, McKinsey found. Many, including Amoco, Circuit City, Kodak, and Kmart, went bankrupt, were acquired, or downsized.

Top-down worked, until it didn’t.

The old playbook was designed to control change, not respond to it. Today, top-down management simply can’t keep up. The faster the world moves, the harder it becomes for a handful of leaders at the top to see every opportunity.

What organizations need now is people who make growth happen without waiting to be told. People who act from the bottom up. Seth Godin called them “Linchpins.” Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina described them as “Good Rebels.” Adam Grant studied them as “Originals.” Different names for the same pattern: people who dare to challenge the status quo and make new ideas happen—against the Resistance.

A keynote speaker gets 25 minutes.

During those 25 minutes, hundreds of people stop working, producing, and selling. Add the cost of the venue, production, travel, and choosing the right speaker becomes a consequential decision.

I spoke with ten conference organizers about what separates a great keynote speaker from someone who merely owns a microphone. From what I have learned, here are eight tests for finding one:

• Real issues. A good keynote addresses one of the audience’s top two or three business or life priorities. Otherwise, people will start scrolling through their phones.
• Credibility. The business world is littered with “experts” who have assembled a talk from a few books. That can work. But a speaker with direct leadership experience or credible research—ideally their own—is far more likely to make an impact.
• Audience proximity. Listening to an astronaut or a wingsuit diver can be inspirational. But when the distance from the audience’s real life is too great, people go home inspired while thinking, “That’s not me.”
• Keynote speaking—not just speaking. Many people enjoy jumping onto a stage and talking, often slide by slide. Keynote speaking is different. As in an opera or a play, the speaker must hold the audience’s attention from the first second for 20 or even 45 minutes—through stories, strong transitions, surprises, pauses, and tension at exactly the right moments. This takes weeks of writing and rehearsing—and a speaker willing to make that investment.
• Fresh content. Even the best speakers can fall into the trap of repeating the same talk for years. It may still be powerful, but eventually it will bore both the audience and the speaker. A professional speaker researches the audience and meaningfully adapts the talk and creates at least one major piece of content for every event.
• Practical tips. Talks are nice. What people really want are two or three things they can apply tomorrow morning.
• Paid to perform. Plenty of speakers will come for free because they have a product or service to sell. That’s legitimate, but it creates an implicit tension. Their first priority may not be the conference—but themselves. Free speakers can add value, but mix them with professionals.
• Real feedback. Conferences and speakers know they may not work together again for months or years; few conferences hire the same speaker two years in a row. The best speakers don’t leave it there. They ask for honest feedback because they want the next keynote to be the best one they have ever given.

Many people can speak. Few can create a moment an audience remembers—and then turn that moment into action.

Every company wants growth. Far fewer know how to make it happen. On September 14, we are kicking off a new Marketing Leadership Masterclass. If you want growth for your team, your company, or your own career, take a look.

We built the Marketing Leadership Masterclass around a simple observation: most business schools teach people how to analyze growth. Very few teach them how to mobilize senior leaders and people across an organization to create it.

That is what the Masterclass Syl Saller and I created is about. Not more theory. Not another collection of clever frameworks. It is about turning ideas into action—and action into impact.

The program is a 12-week online sprint, but it doesn’t feel like a conventional online course. Participants work as a community. They debate real issues live, challenge one another, and solve problems together. For companies, we can tailor the challenges around their most pressing business issues. The learning doesn’t sit beside the work. It becomes part of the work.

Our mentors make the experience special. They are top marketers who contribute alongside demanding day jobs. Leading Chief Marketing Officers also join us for candid live debates about what it really takes to lead growth.

Take a look at the details here. Or message Olli. He will make the next steps easy.

Talking about growth is easy. Let’s make it happen.

People in business are scared. And the fear has a name: AI.

Every CEO is talking about AI. Every agency is suddenly an AI agency. And in private conversations, many people are freaking out.

In business, there has always been fear. Business attracts plenty of insecure overachievers: smart people who suspect everyone else knows more than they do. But the fear surrounding AI is bigger than anything I have seen before.

Remember digital? When it became a thing, everyone feared missing out. People scrambled to become ‘digital experts’. Along the way, companies pushed out experienced people to hire ‘digital natives’. It was marketing’s first great rush down the tool rabbit hole. It didn’t end well. Businesses moved down the funnel. Forget strategy. Now we had ‘performance marketing’ and little else.

History is repeating itself

SEO (search engine optimization) was yesterday. Hello GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). Today, everyone is taking an AI course. A whole generation is rushing down the next tool rabbit hole.

But people are missing the bigger story. AI is ending the knowledge economy as we know it, where success meant having the answers.

The knowledge economy went like this. We send you to school to memorise facts. We throw you a test. Get the answer right and you earn your A. Stack enough As and you earn your degree. Take more courses, get more degrees. These degrees become your ticket to a top job, where employers pay thousands for your knowledge. It’s how many people built careers in digital.

But AI has changed the economics of answers.

‘How do we make this banana-shaped car more aerodynamic?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘Which of these 10,000 images will perform best with our ad copy?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘How do we create an avatar that sells our product 24/7?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap.

Today, answers to complex questions appear in seconds. Instant. Cheap.

We can’t out-AI AI. We can no longer build careers on having the best answers. On knowing every AI tool. Success in the future comes from asking the best questions – just as great business leaders always have:

• What if beauty wasn’t about models? (Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.)
• What if everyone was an athlete? (Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.)
• What if honesty sold more cars than perfection? (Volkswagen’s ‘Think Small’.)
• What if an engagement ring became a social norm? (De Beers’ ‘A Diamond Is Forever’.)

These are difficult questions. The questions only we can ask.

Yahoo once tried to catalogue the internet — every book, every website — partly by hand. It became clumsy. Slow. Then Google came along and asked a better question: ‘How can we make the world’s information accessible and useful?’ Instead of lists, Google built an algorithm that scaled, learned and stayed simple. Google won because it asked the better question.

AI would have helped Yahoo catalogue the internet faster. Yahoo would still have lost, because it was solving the wrong problem.

AI will make everybody more productive. It will replace dull jobs — and interesting ones. And AI will churn out millions of answers, every day. AI is exceptionally good at average work for average people.

That’s why the most valuable skill in the AI age isn’t AI. It’s asking questions worth answering.

(I wrote a version of this for Marketing Week.)

The Swiss Army knife is a knife that collided with a toolbox. Someone added scissors, a screwdriver, a bottle opener, and a corkscrew. The knife was no longer merely a knife. It had become something new.

Many breakthrough ideas begin with existing world crashing into each other:

• Airbnb collided a hotel with a private home and an online marketplace.
• Slack collided chat rooms with email and a searchable knowledge base.
• The smartphone collided a phone with a music player and a computer.

But smashing two things together doesn’t automatically produce a great idea. A toaster combined with an umbrella would certainly be original, but pretty useless (I guess).

Creative collision needs a reason.

Tay Guan Hin has written a book about it. He argues that breakthrough ideas often emerge from tension: two things people want but find difficult to have at the same time. Travelers want comfort but also authenticity. People want more technology but fewer devices.

Once we understand the tension, we stop looking for better versions of the same thing. We stop studying other knives and start looking at toolboxes. We stop studying hotels and start looking at private homes. We start looking for answers in completely different worlds.

Most people ask:
“How can I improve this?”

Creative people ask:
“What else already exists that could resolve this tension?”

“Our budget was tiny, so we had to be creative.” That’s how a team explained its award-winning business success. They meant “tiny” as an excuse. It may have been the reason they won.

Many breakthroughs began with scarce resources:

• When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded, the astronauts couldn’t fit the Command Module’s carbon dioxide filters into their Lunar Module’s life-support system. So they made an adapter from a plastic bag, cardboard, a spacesuit hose, and duct tape.
• Red Bull couldn’t outspend Coca-Cola, so it built a brand through extreme sports and funny little cartoons.
• Ukraine couldn’t match Russia’s massive navy, so it developed small sea drones, damaging or sinking vessels many times their size.
• Dollar Shave Club couldn’t afford a glossy launch campaign. It spent $4,500 on a funny video instead. The traffic crashed its website and generated 12,000 orders within 48 hours.

More resources make things easier. Scarce resources make us think harder.

Sometimes, smaller budgets lead to bigger idea.

Customer satisfaction lives in the gap between expectation and experience.

Last night, after a conference keynote, I had dinner. Someone had recommended the restaurant. I hesitated. $350 for dinner is steep, even on a special day. But it was a special day, so I went.

The welcome was warm. The view was stunning. Nine courses promised a memorable evening.

The first dish was nice. The second was nice-ish. The third was mediocre. Courses four and five were dull. By then, something was brewing inside me. Not the food.

Was I really spending a pile of money on an average meal? I could have eaten in a family restaurant. I could have wandered through a local food market. Instead, I had followed a recommendation and gone fancy.

The waitress noticed. “How is everything?” she asked. The useless question no customer can ever answer.

In the friendliest possible way, I admitted that I was disappointed. Everything was fine. For $350, fine wasn’t fine.

Her boss appeared. Then his boss. They apologized, brought me several more equally average dishes, and offered me a discount. Eventually, I made peace with the restaurant. The food wasn’t great, but the people were lovely.

The bill arrived. I added a generous tip. None of this was the waitress’s fault. Then my phone lit up: “You have just paid $32.”

$32? I looked again and called the waitress back. Surely, I had underpaid. “No, sir,” she said. “It’s all correct.”

I had miscalculated the exchange rate. Spectacularly. The dinner had never cost $350. It cost $35—before the discount.

Suddenly, the view looked amazing, the service felt exceptional, the dishes became interesting. I had just eaten the best $35 dinner of my life.

I called the manager, confessed, and apologized to the team. The next day, I went back for dinner.

We usually think satisfaction comes from delivering more than people expect. And it does. But there is another way: ensuring people expect the right thing.

Borrowed opinions won’t make you smarter.

The internet gave everyone a voice. If you want to write a blog that 100,000 people read, you can. If you want to host a podcast that 100,000 people listen to, you can.

That is the good news.

The internet also gave a voice to people with inflated egos, shaky facts, and a good camera. They call themselves influencers. But if you look closer, many of their “facts” belong in the bin.

I call them BinFluencers.

BinFluencers create clutter and drown out the voices worth listening to. To get clicks, they need volume—five, ten, twenty hot takes every week. Every message has to feel fresh and surprising. But fresh and surprising aren’t the same as true.

You’ve heard these:
“Customer experience is the new currency!” Maybe. But tell that to the millions who line up for stripped-back service from Frontier and Ryanair just to save twenty bucks. Experience matters—until you ask people to pay for it.

“NFTs will change everything!” Really? For a while, every brand seemed to need its own NFT collection—digital collectibles recorded on a blockchain. When the market cooled, the gimmicks disappeared. That rare tennis-ball NFT you bought for hundreds now trades for twenty-five dollars.

If you take advice from a BinFluencer shouting market “truths” on TikTok, then repeat those ideas without thinking, you become a chatbot. Chatbots don’t build new things. Chatbots repeat—until one day they’re replaced by a better chatbot.

When your truth is borrowed, pressure breaks it. When your truth is earned, pressure makes it stronger.

Unfollow the BinFluencer crowd.

Learn from everyone. But believe only what survives your own thinking.