In this Issue

🪎    Golden Age of AI
🏁    Own the Last Mile
🏎️    Vibe Coding MVPs

🪎  Golden Age of AI

AI will never be cheaper than it is right now.

For every dollar of revenue earned on AI, Big Tech is spending up to $4 on infrastructure. This party won’t last forever. At some point, we will pay a lot more to access AI and its ecosystem of products.

This reminds me of what the internet was like in the nineties, even into the early 2000s. It was messy and techie, but you had “free rein.” Remember the days of Napster?

As the internet matured, it became refined and monetized. Now you’re paying for everything. Just look at your monthly streaming spend.

According to Deloitte, the average American household pays for four video streaming services and two music services, averaging $96 per month. That’s a lot more than I spent on CDs and cable TV back in the day.

AI services will follow a similar path. In addition to the LLM tools, you will pay for services that sit atop AI. Your costs will rise dramatically as you need more and more services to power your business.

The opportunity to embrace AI in your business won’t get better. Now is the moment to overspend and overinvest.

Even if the ROI of an automation or a tool is low, you are learning. If you set budget limits, the costs and risks are low, and the value is high. This is your chance to build your company’s institutional and operational knowledge before you have to pay the real cost of AI.

🏁  Own the Last Mile

Use AI to increase productivity and creativity, but don’t publish with it.

Looking at a competitor’s website, the marketing manager said, “That looks like a Claude website.” She then pulled up three more sites, and they all had the same look and feel. The strange part was the competitor wasn’t a small player.

Users are good at spotting AI content, and they don’t like it.

According to a Clutch survey, 55% of consumers view a brand less favorably if they identify AI-produced content. A Harris Poll goes a step further, finding 63% of consumers are less likely to buy.

My company’s policy is to own the last mile. We don’t publish with AI. Every newsletter, social post, report, strategy, or anything we publish is created by humans.

We absolutely use AI. I encourage my team to max out their Claude and Cursor credits each month. I question if we’re pushing hard enough when we’re not hitting our usage limits.

We use AI for research, prototyping, analysis, and development. I challenge us to use the tools to 10X our productivity. It’s not about working harder or working people out of a job. It’s about our ability to create and deliver even more.

For our brand, owning the last mile is non-negotiable. That’s the quality and relationship our customers expect from us.

📊  One Stat to Watch

54%

of Canadians would choose a more expensive Canadian-made product over a similar imported one, according to PwC Canada.

🏎️ ​​ Vibe Coding MVPs

My colleague, Megan, messaged me one morning, “Can I vibe code an app?”

Not knowing what she was asking, I texted back, “Huh?” She wrote, “I saw someone build an entire app using AI in about a month and thought, if they can do it, why can’t I?”

I gave her the green light, and within a week she had a prototype. Within three weeks, it was a client-ready MVP.

That was a watershed moment for our team. We suddenly saw how AI was more than automating mundane tasks or creating crappy marketing content. It was a platform to realize your ideas.

For twenty years, our approach has been to select best-of-breed software applications and then conform to them. Instead of customizing the software, we changed our processes and systems to align with how the product functioned.

That worked well, until now. With vibe coding, we can build an automation, app, or workflow without any coding knowledge. We rely on our business acumen to guide Claude to build it.

Vibe coding gets us to an MVP, but our Achilles’ heel is we often don’t know how our apps work. So we hired a full-stack developer and UX designer. They are taking the MVPs and building them to proper software standards.

My story is not unique. We are seeing similar leaps in our clients. For instance, a distributor built and launched a wholesale portal in six weeks. The CEO said, “If I started this project a year ago, that would have cost me $1 million and eighteen months.”

My advice to everyone is to simply try. It’s the golden age of AI, after all. If you have an idea, ask your AI how to build it, and then have it build it.

🤔  Thoughts on Today’s Issue?

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