Five minutes.
That is how long it took to get back a deliverable that would have taken my team one week just a year ago.
It looked finished.
I have been doing this for nearly 30 years. I watched search arrive…social, mobile, marketing automation. Every one of them got sold as the end of something, and none of them were.
I think AI is different. Just not in the direction everyone is arguing about.
What got cheap…
Generation got cheap.
First drafts. Volume. The mechanical sweep across everything you own.
Here is what that looks like in my world. Finding out what is wrong across hundreds of product pages used to be a week of someone’s life. Titles, meta descriptions, headings, alt text, structured data, thin content, internal links. One page at a time, in a spreadsheet, until your eyes crossed.
Now it is an export, a crawl and a scoring pass in hours.
That‘s not a small thing. That is a week of a smart person’s life handed back, every month, forever (I am not going to pretend to be sad about it).
A thousand product descriptions used to be a quote. Now it is a Tuesday.
Cheap.
What did not get cheap…
Being right.
Confidence became free. Correctness did not. (Correctness…I had to look that up to be sure I used it…correctly)
That is the story. These outputs are not wrong the way broken things are wrong. Broken is easy because it announces itself. This wrong reads clean. It sounds sure. It has the cadence of someone who knows.
And you will believe it, because there is nothing in the writing to tell you not to.
It lies confidently.
So where did the value go?
It didn’t leave. It just moved.
For years the scarce thing was producing the work. Writing the page, building the campaign, filling the catalog. That was the bottleneck, and that was what you paid for.
That bottleneck is “gone.” The new one is knowing what to look at. And that is not a thing you can generate. You get it from having done it.
Knowing that a fitment is wrong before a customer finds out. Knowing that a claim cannot be kept before it goes on the website. Knowing which page out of five hundred is the one actually carrying the revenue, and which four hundred are fine and should be left alone.
None of that is typing. All of it is judgment, and judgment just got repriced.
If you have been doing this for 25 years, you did not get less valuable this year. You got more valuable. It just stopped being about how fast you can produce and started being about what you can catch.
Two days
I used AI to iterate on one of our landing pages recently. Gave it the context, the project, the files.
Version one came back in minutes and it looked finished. I could have sent it over to the team saying it was ready to go live.
Instead, I spent two days working on it.
Not fixing bugs. Finding the things that looked right and were not. A badge that claimed one certification and displayed a logo from a different company. A promise in the copy that we could not actually keep at the pace we work. A statistic nobody had ever verified, sitting inside an image tag where it had never once been seen by a human. There was content about us that was completely made up by AI.
Minutes to a draft. Two days to something true.
That second number is the job now. It always was. It just used to be hidden inside the first one.
What to do with this…
You do not have to be afraid of it and you do not have to pretend to love it.
Split the work.
The part that got cheap, let it run. Drafts, sweeps, coverage, the first ninety percent of anything mechanical. Use it hard. You are leaving money on the table if you do not.
The part that got expensive, put a person on it. And here is the test, which takes about three seconds:
If the output is confident and you cannot personally verify it, that is the part that needs a human.
Everything else, let it go.
That is it. That is the whole method.
The good news, and I do mean good, is that you already have the expensive half. It is the thing you have been building since before any of this existed. Every wrong spec you caught. Every promise you talked someone out of making. Every time you knew a number was off before you could explain why.
That was always the valuable part.
Now it is the scarce one too.
AI changed the workflow. It didn’t replace the need for expertise.
Let’s talk about where AI can save your team time, and where experienced judgment still matters most.
