August 2026
Roger Hurni, a behavioral marketing agency founder, was discussing how AI adoption is unfolding across industries. His point was that speed of adoption matters less than the depth of thinking someone brings to using the tool.
Transcript
it. Well, let me answer your last question first, and then I'll address how that went about. I would probably say to that person, we're probably not the right agency for you. Look, there's always going to be bad actors. There's always going to people who are looking for shortcuts. And you're going to have that person who's a solopreneur, one person real estate agent who's just going to use a claud, crank out an ad, crank out a press release, send it, and they don't care. It's just content that's going out in the world. That does not mean there's depth of thinking. That does not mean they're looking at unrealized opportunities or looking for gaps. That doesn't mean they're not trying to expand their thinking. Companies that are more sophisticated, that want to truly have market share and set themselves up with points of differentiation, aren't going to rely on the first answer out of ChatGTP. So they're just never going to be a client. I just won't take them. And in terms of a philosophy document, because you're talking about some specifics, our philosophy document doesn't say we do this with it or we do that with it. Like it says, this is how we work with AI. We use it to expand those options. We do not let it replace judgment. We use it to find gaps. We'll use it to comb through mountains of research that it would take way too long and be made cost prohibitive for us to do by hand so that we can synthesize those answers in a way that we can apply our own judgment to it and look for additional opportunities. So a philosophy document, again, I think lean hard on the word philosophy. It is not specificity, right? We're not saying, oh, we use it to create an ad at this stage, right? Or we use it to create the writing of a press release or even a draft of a press release. We never talk about that. We may, we may not. It's the context around how we use AI that's the philosophy document.
This kind of unscrutinized, uncritiqued use of AI. I don't know about you, but I'm seeing quite a lot of that. And we're seeing briefs come in. Half of the new briefs we get in from companies that should know better are purely written with AI. You can tell they've not been scrutinized at all. We've identified AI copy on one of the major ad magazines in the UK come through on an email. And I think it's pretty widespread at the moment. Is this, I know there's a term you use, expensive sameness. Is this what we're talking about here?
Yeah, but any new technology does that will. I mean, any new technology that does disruptor. It usually runs through two industries first, pornography and music. And once it gets past that, it goes into people that try to do take shortcuts or do nefarious stuff with it. And once you get past that group of people, and we're still in that group of people right now, you're going to have people who understand this technology can be incredibly powerful and use it in ways that you never thought of. I mean, the desktop computer was like that. IBM's like, why do we need, why does people, why do people need a computer on their desk? They just did, they didn't understand that the future is, you know, for our, in our, in our time frame that we're in right now, the future doesn't belong to people who use AI the fastest. It belongs to people who use it the deepest, right? The ones who question more, the ones who don't have it replace their judgment. There's a place in the world for AI, just like there's a place in the world for calculators and computers, and they replace the side rule and the abacus and all those other things. We're adopting a new technology and we're going through the growing pains of adopting that new technology. But at the end of that, if everybody has the same tool, who's the better person? It's the person who thinks better with it and not the person who just looks for output.
How long have we got to go then? How much more pain have we got to get through before we get to that point?
If I had that answer, I would be a gazillionaire. I
think. Yeah, it's a few more months here, I reckon.
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