The next competitive edge isn’t just using AI. It’s building with it — intentionally. Most of us are still treating AI as a tool we consume. But the real shift? Becoming someone who creates with it. Think about what it means to wear every hat at once — → The founder who sees the opportunity → The designer who shapes the experience → The product leader who defines what gets built → The investor who backs only what’s worth scaling AI is making that possible for one person, one team, one focused operator. But here’s the catch nobody talks about: AI is only as intelligent as the data you feed it. Build on bad data? You get a fast, confident, wrong product. Build with the right data — your domain, your customers, your operations? You get an unfair advantage. For those of us in travel and tourism — tour operators, cab networks, holiday package providers — this isn’t abstract. The businesses that will win the next decade are the ones quietly building AI-native operations today, with their own data as the moat. The question isn’t whether AI will reshape your industry. It’s whether you’ll be the one doing the reshaping. What’s one area in your business where you’re sitting on gold-mine data but haven’t leveraged it yet? Drop it in the comments.

If you run an agency and you're not building with AI, read this. Not because you're behind. Because almost nobody is actually ahead. Take a look at the graphic below: Every gray dot is 3.2 million people who have never touched AI. Not once. That's 84% of the world. 6.8 billion people. Of the ones who have: 1.3 billion tried a free chatbot. 15-25 million pay for it. 2-5 million are actually building with it. See that tiny red corner? That's the whole "saturated" market everyone's scared of. 0.04% of humans. The problem was never saturation. It's perception. The internet is flooded with AI slop. Bad content. Lazy outputs. Hallucinated nonsense. People see it and write off the whole category. They don't see agencies using Claude Code to automate client reporting in minutes. They don't see founders rebuilding entire operations without hiring. They don't see what's possible when you stop using it like a search engine. Most people haven't seen real AI yet. They've seen the cheap version. That's the gap. And it's enormous. The agencies that figure this out now won't be competing in a crowded market. They'll be operating in one that barely exists yet.

AI doesn’t just scale productivity, it also scales whatever you tolerate: If you accept bland outputs, you won’t just ship something average once, instead you’ll build systems that produce average by default. The worst part is most of us don’t notice it happening (at least at first). Mediocrity compounds and once it becomes infrastructure, it’s painfully hard to unwind. In this week’s post, I argue that AI doesn’t reward speed. It rewards standards and judgement. https://lnkd.in/e8wTghF4 #AI #DesignLeadership #ProductStrategy #AIDesign #Craft #Innovation

Bhai, AI sab kuch khud kar lega na? A cousin asked me this after watching an AI demo online. It made me realise something. Most people see AI at its flashiest. What capable teams are building looks very different. Recently, I spoke with a marketing team running AI inside real growth workflows. The outputs looked fine. The dashboard was green. But when someone asked why a certain lead was prioritised, no one could clearly explain the decision path. That is where the real gap shows up. Smarter prompts were not the issue. Clarity was. They needed to see how decisions were made. What logic connected each step. Where a human could step in if something looked off. That shift from black box outputs to visible systems is what people call glass-box transparency. It is also the design philosophy behind Architect by Lyzr. Instead of jumping straight into prompts, the approach is structured. First analyze the workflow and decision logic. Then orchestrate coordinated agents with defined roles. Then build with observability and guardrails embedded from the start. For marketing teams, that distinction matters. Growth is not just about generating faster content. It is about trusting AI with campaigns, budgets, and customer journeys. And trust does not come from intelligence alone. It comes from visibility. If you are exploring AI for marketing beyond small experiments, this is worth looking at: https://lnkd.in/g_w6xSFX The future will not belong to teams casually experimenting with AI. It will belong to teams that can clearly see how their AI thinks."

Day 2 of a deep dive into Steve Bevilacqua’s Human-First AI framework. Yesterday was about trust; today is about where we actually apply the tech. Many teams use AI as a "content factory" to churn out more emails or blogs. But the real value? Using it as a research partner. Steve notes that while many use AI for ideation, few trust it for deep research. Letting AI synthesize market data frees up the human experts to focus on the high-level strategy that machines just can't replicate. #MarketingStrategy #MarketResearch #CreativeOperations https://lnkd.in/e4NKS8Kn

The people scared of AI in creative work were never really the creatives.. I think they're asking the wrong question. We're using AI at scale, across research, content, ad creative, automation pipelines. Tools like Claude, Gemini, AssemblyAI wired together to do in hours what used to take days. We’ve learned that AI doesn’t create, it executes. The difference between output that converts and output that gets ignored has nothing to do with the tool. It has everything to do with the thinking that went into the prompt, the strategy behind the brief, the human judgment that says "this isn't right yet." To be honest, what AI exposed is this.. a lot of what we called "creative work" was actually just production work dressed up as strategy. AI ate that part. Rightfully so. The creative thinking? The cultural instinct? The ability to look at a piece of content and know it'll land before it does? That is still human. And to be very honest it's more valuable now than it's ever been. We're not using AI instead of thinking. We're using it so we can think about the things that actually matter. The people worried about AI in creative work are usually the ones whose value was always in the execution, not the vision. An uncomfortable truth.

I thought AI would make things effortless. few months in, it did the opposite. It exposed how messy the workflow was. Here’s the truth no one tells you about using AI in real work: 👉 AI alone doesn’t give results. 👉 Humans alone can’t scale fast enough. 👉 The magic is in the hybrid. Human + AI = Results. When I started, I believed in the “one-click output” dream. Type a prompt → get perfect output → done. Reality? Accuracy was barely 50–70%. Good enough to look right. Not good enough to be right. And that’s dangerous. Because AI doesn’t fail loudly. It fails subtly — wrong tone, off-brand messaging, half-baked logic. So I had to change how I worked. Not tools. Not prompts. Workflow. Here’s what actually worked for me: AI for speed, not final output I stopped expecting perfection. Now I use AI for drafts, directions, and raw ideas. Human for control and context Every output goes through manual refinement. Tone, accuracy, brand voice — that’s human territory. Structure > prompts Random prompts = random results. Clear frameworks = consistent outputs. Once I started giving AI structure, everything improved. Brand consistency is the real challenge Consistency needs: – Defined tone – Clear messaging rules – Reusable frameworks Without that, every output feels like a different person wrote it. And that kills trust. The biggest shift? I stopped treating AI like a shortcut and started treating it like a junior team member. Fast. Capable. But needs direction, correction, and review. I learned this the hard way. Wasted time. Rewrote outputs. Fixed mistakes. But now? We’re faster. Cleaner. More consistent. And most importantly — in control. AI didn’t replace the work. It made the gaps in my system visible. Fix the system → AI starts working. Ignore it → AI creates more chaos. If you’re using AI right now and feeling like: “Why isn’t this as powerful as everyone says?” You’re not wrong. You’re just missing the workflow. Build that — and everything changes.

6.8 Billion people have never used AI. Yes, what you read is correct. But that’s not all. Damian Player recently shared a visualization that is the ultimate reality check. Out of the 8.1 billion people on Earth: 84% have never used AI. That is the massive gray area taking up almost the entire grid. 16% have tried a free chatbot. That is the green strip at the bottom. 0.3% pay for premium AI tools. That is the tiny yellow sliver. 0.04% use advanced coding scaffolds. Those are the barely visible red dots in the bottom right corner. Living in NewYork and working on the Workspace AI team at Google, my entire world revolves around this tech. Being surrounded by the smartest minds in the industry is incredibly inspiring. But working in the epicenter of the AI industry also creates a massive echo chamber. It is so easy to assume the whole world is moving at this exact same speed. They are not. If you are reading this post right now, your perception of how mainstream AI is comes from a tiny fraction of the global population. No, you are not late. We are at the very beginning. Think about what the internet looked like in 2005. That is exactly where we are with AI right now. Real growth is not going to come from more complex prompts or coding agents. True global adoption will happen when AI becomes invisible. It will come from simpler interfaces, offline access, and AI built seamlessly into the apps we already use every single day. For builders, the market you are addressing today is just a fraction of where it is going. For brands, the window to show up early and own the space is wide open. Online, the AI conversation feels completely saturated. In reality, it has barely started. So, are we overestimating how mainstream AI really is?

Le Creuset just went viral for something that would've made no sense two years ago. They posted a video and people in the comments asked if it was AI. So Le Creuset responded: "This was created entirely by hand using digital art and real video footage, not AI." And people loved it. The comments were full of "good for them" and "this is why I buy from brands that care." I keep thinking about what this actually means. "Made by humans" is now a quality signal. Not a production detail. A quality signal. Like "organic" or "handmade." People see AI in an ad and assume the brand is cutting corners. And here's the thing, they're not wrong. Most AI-generated ads ARE cutting corners. Most of them look generated. The robot hands, the drifting faces, the generic everything. The brands using AI poorly ruined it for everyone. But the answer isn't "don't use AI." The answer is use AI in a way that nobody can tell. Because the brands that figure out how to use these tools without looking like they used them, that's where the value is going. The worst thing you can do right now is make something that looks AI-generated. Not because AI is bad. Because bad AI is everywhere and people are done with it.

82% of businesses haven’t touched AI. Not even once. Steven Bartlett’s visualization flipped my perspective completely: - Each dot = 3.2M people. - 2,500 dots = all 8.1B humans. - The color? The most advanced AI interaction that person has ever had. Now, look at the sea of grey. 👉 6.8B people—84% of humanity—have never used AI. 👉 The green strip? 1.3B free chatbot users. 👉 The yellow sliver? 15–25M paying subscribers. 👉 That tiny red dot? Just 2–5M using AI for coding. We scroll Twitter and LinkedIn thinking everyone is automating their company, launching AI startups, or shipping products overnight. But show a basic AI tool to someone back home, and they stare like you’ve just handed them fire. Because for most of the world… that’s exactly what it is. 🔥 Here’s the kicker: - 82% of businesses don’t use AI at all. - Only 4% have mature AI capabilities. - 78% of executives admit it’s moving too fast for their teams. So how do you actually get started? It’s embarrassingly simple: 1. Pay for one AI tool. Use it daily for a month. 2. Read one book about AI. 3. Watch one long explainer video. That’s it. Do those three things and you’re already in the top 1% of AI knowledge worldwide. No PhD. No deep dive into transformer architecture. Just curiosity, consistency, and a willingness to play with the fire most people haven’t even seen yet. Credit : Mike Holp