21 Jul The right amount of intelligence
It’s 2026 and if ever something needed a “right amount of” discussion, it’s ai.
There is obviously a lot of hype, with literally millions of articles written about and authored by ai – running the gamut from “this will lead humanity to a higher plane of consciousness” to “it will destroy us”. Both could be true, or neither, and trying to be comforted by looking for a “the truth must lie somewhere in the middle” really isn’t. Inarguably, it has been the biggest technology disruptor since the internet caught most of us off-guard a few decades ago, and it may prove to be an even bigger inflection point. A crystal ball would make a great birthday gift, just sayin’.
For a lot of folks, it’s wielded like a magic spell they learned at Hogwarts. “Just plug it into ChatGTP” they say, and they expect all their problems to be solved in the time it takes for rather elegant looking solution to be kicked out. It IS freakishly impressive.
And sometimes helpful.
We had a project where the client needed 350 new pieces of content based on existing content they’d written, and the deadline was in 4 weeks and wasn’t the only thing either of us (client + agency) were working on. They had started on the project and taken 20 hours to create the first 20 content blocks. Although none of us have math degrees, we didn’t need to Claude to tell us that they would need another 320 hours or so to finish, and there were only 3 weeks remaining. Did I mention they only have a single copy-writer on staff?
Of course we were told to cast that spell and crank out the rest of the content in an afternoon, however there were exact specifications, ranges, and other assorted bits of data that absolutely had to be correct, while maintaining their particular brand voice – indistinguishable from the 2500 documents that had been created over the years. Our solution was to treat it like a tool instead of magic. We spent a few hours over a couple of days refining our model with the copy-writer (to say she was unenthusiastic at the start undersells the warm/not reception we were given) until we had something that was 99.9% accurate and could be quickly reviewed edited and published in under 2 minutes.
We completed our part in two days. There were some check-ins to ensure our model wasn’t drifting, and moved the whole thing from “the math ain’t mathing” to “we can finish this on time”. Their writer will not be naming her next child “Anthropic” or anything like that, nor will she be thrilled to tackle another project like this any time soon, however disdain did slightly morph into grudging acceptance or borderline respect.
To us, it’s a tool and tools require a level of expertise to use correctly, efficiently and profitably. After all, if you use this tool and your sales don’t go up or your processes become more efficient, what’s the point?
Sure, there are definite uses for Agentic AIs that are plugged into everything, making hundreds or thousands of decisions behind the scenes without human intervention, but in July of 2026 that’s not us. If your business requires a level of human touch and connectedness to succeed in your field, but need to punch above your weight – we might be a good fit.
Maybe you need to 25 or 50 new website variations to exhaust all/most of the possibilities to get everyone on board in order to move forward, but your budget allows for only 2?
What’s all this you’re hearing about AEO or GEO? You heard one of your competitors talking about it, you don’t want to be left out, but you don’t want to be taken advantage of as you create a strategy and begin implementation? (Yeah, we’ll do a post about this in the next few weeks)
What if you just need 300 blocks of new content in 3 weeks, but also want to learn enough to handle the next requirement on your own (If she can be convinced)?
If you’re looking for a trusted partner who can get you started in this brave new world without overselling the hype, fill out the form here on our site and let’s chat. If you’re local and want to grab a beer at the end of the day or enjoy some live music, we’re down for that too.
Let’s see an ai do that…