AI can do the work. First it has to read you right.
Sam Altman predicts that AI will soon handle most of what marketers, agencies, and creative teams do, instantly, cheaply, and at scale.
This piece comes from a conversation between Matthew McQueeny and Lawrence Shaw of AAAnow. A short clip is on LinkedIn; the full interview is linked in the media panel. That prediction reads as either alarming or freeing, depending on where you sit. The conversation takes the freeing view, then asks the harder question underneath it: when capability stops being scarce, what decides whether AI works for you or against you.
01The leverage question.
Altman’s figure, 95% of the work handled by AI, points to a sudden shift in who holds creative and strategic capability. When the tools that once required an agency, a creative department, or a consulting team are within reach of a single person, the scarce thing is no longer production. It is judgement. The question is not whether AI can create. It is what people do with the leverage it hands them.
02Disruption or opportunity.
For large organizations built around scale, that leverage can read as disruption: much of what justified the headcount is now cheap. For smaller, nimble, expertise-led teams, it can be the opening of a career, the chance to take on work that used to sit out of reach. Same capability, opposite meaning, decided by how a business is built.
03The foundation underneath.
There is a catch, and it is the part Lawrence Shaw’s work at AAAnow is built around. Before AI can represent your company, your products, and your expertise, the digital foundation underneath has to be in order. While much of the market races to optimize for AI visibility, AAAnow looks at something more basic: the material AI actually reads about you.
It comes down to four questions.
- What information about your organization actually exists online?
- Is it accurate?
- Is it current?
- And, most of all, how does AI see you?
04The front door.
AI is becoming the front door to discovery, trust, and decisions. If that is where people now arrive, cleaning up your digital footprint may matter more than producing new content, because the new content lands on the same foundation. This is the ground The Agency Revenue Radar works on: reading your public estate from the outside, the way AI does, so that what AI finds is accurate, current, and yours.
The leverage Altman describes is real. It is also only as good as the record it draws on.
Listen to the conversation.
The full interview runs through what changes when capability stops being scarce, and what has to be true underneath for AI to represent you well. The short clip and the full conversation are both linked in the media panel.
Listen to the full conversation