Why We Need to Stop Talking Philosophically About AI

Or...Is That the Right Font?

Years ago, before I ran a Martech company, I worked in the music business. I worked with artists whose names you would recognize and whose habits you would find instructive, and among the things I learned, probably the single most important thing, was that the great ones understood something about presentation that the rest of us spend our entire careers failing to grasp.

I was involved in a promotion with a major airline. An artist was filming a television special and walking through a plane full of fans while cameras rolled. She stumbled over a word and used profanity. Not loudly. Not aggressively. Just a reflexive, human, momentary lapse.

And then she did something that I have never forgotten. She turned around, found the person who was filming behind her on a phone, and asked, gently but firmly, for the video to be deleted. Not because she was afraid of scandal. Not because the word itself mattered. But because she understood, in a way that I have spent a decade trying to teach my team, that every moment of presentation is load-bearing. Every moment either reinforces what you are trying to be or undermines it. There is no neutral ground. There is no off-camera. The thirty seconds that someone spends forming an impression of you are not recoverable. They become the story that person tells about you for years. Possibly forever.

Which leads me to a question I ask my team so often that it has become a mix of joke and threat.

Is that the right font?

I do not ask it because I am obsessed with typography. I am not a designer (although I like to annoy my designer wife by saying I am). But I have eyes, and even Mrs. Rachel helps my toddler understand their function.

I ask it because the font is sometimes not right, and the reason the font is sometimes not right tells you everything you need to know about why I have, quietly and with some degree of thought, stopped writing about artificial intelligence.

Bear with me. This will make sense.

What the Font Question is Really About

My company is a service agency. I say this without apology or pretension, because the word “service” has been so degraded by those who provide it that it requires periodic rehabilitation. We build technology solutions for businesses. We configure their systems, design their customer journeys, and occasionally talk them out of doing something that would be expensive and stupid. This is our business.

And our business has no moat.

I know this sounds like a damaging admission. It is not. It is a statement of fact that, once accepted, is enormously clarifying. We do not have a proprietary algorithm. We do not have a patent. We do not have a platform that locks clients into our ecosystem (even though we do have one, there is choice). What we have is the ability to look at a problem, understand it more quickly and more deeply than those living inside it, and present a solution in a way that inspires confidence.

That last phrase, present a solution in a way that inspires confidence, is the whole game. Not the solution itself. Not the strategy. Not the technology. The presentation. The font. The alignment. The way the deck looks when it lands in someone’s inbox. The way the first slide establishes, in three seconds, whether the person who made this thing cared about it.

This is our competitive moat. It is the only competitive moat a service business can have. And it is the thing that artificial intelligence can, without care, destroy.

What AI Actually Exposes

For the past two years, I have been writing about AI. I have written about its promise, its limitations, its implications for businesses like mine, and its effect on the people who work for me. I have written thoughtfully (or tried to be), and I have written often, and I have taken a pause (whether you noticed or not), and here is why.

The conversation about AI has become the thing it was supposed to replace: noise. It is the same twelve talking points recycled by the same nine hundred people in the same breathless language, and at this point, I may be contributing to the problem rather than solving it. The more I write about AI, the less useful my writing becomes, because the category has been so thoroughly colonized by hype merchants, trend forecasters, and recently converted evangelists that anything I say, no matter how grounded, no matter how practical, lands in a swamp of content so dense that it cannot be distinguished from the rest.

But that is only the surface reason. The deeper reason is that AI forced me to confront something about my own business that I had been avoiding, and the thing it forced me to confront had nothing to do with AI at all.

Here it is: I have been watching my team use AI to produce work that, by any reasonable standard, is competent. The strategy is sound. The logic is defensible. The deliverable exists and functions. And it is, at times, terrible.

I’m going to ignore the (greater) good and focus on the bad for a moment. When awry, it is not terrible in its substance. It is terrible in its presentation. The fonts are often wrong. The formatting is inconsistent. The deck was built in Claude instead of our design system. The document was exported as a Pages file instead of a Google Doc. The proposal was generated by an AI assistant and presented without the twenty minutes of human attention that would have transformed it from something that looks automated into something that looks like it was made by someone who gives a damn.

It is not the AI’s fault.

The AI did its job. It produced a first draft. It generated a structure. It assembled the relevant information in a coherent order. The failure happened in the space between what the machine produced and what a human being was allowed to leave the building with their name on it. The failure is not technological. It is aesthetic. It is the absence of the question I keep asking (Is that the right font?), which is really the question: Did you look at this? Did you look at it the way the person receiving it would? Did you spend time imagining what this says about us?

The Thing AI Cannot Produce

I was on a call recently with a prospective client. We talked for about forty-five minutes, and at the end, he said something that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. He said: I haven’t talked to someone who is articulate and meaningfully understands what I’m trying to do in a long time.

This is the nicest thing anyone has said to me this year. It may also be untrue. But it is, when you examine it, a deeply disturbing thing to say. Because what he was telling me is not that we are exceptional. What he was telling me is that the bar has fallen so far that the default experience of talking to a service provider has become so generic, so templated, so obviously produced by someone who ran the client’s company through a prompt and called it research, that a person who actually listens and actually thinks now registers as remarkable.

This is the real consequence of AI in the service industry, and it has nothing to do with whether the technology works. The technology works fine. The consequence is that it has given mediocre practitioners a faster way to produce mediocre work, and, in doing so, has made the gap between those who care and those who don’t more visible than ever.

If you are a business owner reading this, the question is not whether to use AI. Use it. Everyone should use it. The question is whether you are using it as a starting point or an ending point. Whether the thing that leaves your office with your name on it went through a human being who looked at it, really looked at it, with the critical eye of someone whose reputation is attached to it, or whether it went straight from the machine to the client because it was, in that maddening phrase, “good enough.”

Good enough is the most expensive standard in business. It is more expensive than excellence, because excellence earns loyalty, referrals, and a kind of reputation that compounds over the years. Good enough earns nothing. It is the minimum required to prevent an immediate complaint. It is the professional equivalent of showing up, not in the admirable sense, but in the sense of the kid in class who is physically present and mentally in another country.

What I Am Going to Write About Instead

We have navigated the philosophy and my 12-step journey of AI ad nauseam. But sometimes the best way to learn something is to teach it. And in the case of AI, my argument is that the best way to figure out what AI is and what it can and cannot do is to start using it and to frame discussions around it in more practical terms.

So I am going to start writing more about things like sales and presentations. Not in the narrow sense of slide decks and pitch documents, although those are included. In the larger sense: the craft of making things that communicate care. The discipline of looking at your own work through the eyes of the person receiving it and asking whether it says what you intend it to say.

This sounds small. It is not small. It is, in fact, the only thing that separates businesses that endure from businesses that churn through clients and wonder why. It is the difference between the artist who understood that a single moment on camera could undermine a carefully built identity and the CEO who sends an AI-generated follow-up email and wonders why the client went with someone else.

I am not anti-AI. I am not anti-technology. I would be a very bad Martech CEO if I were.

What I am is anti-laziness dressed up as efficiency, anti-automation that substitutes volume for value, and anti-the particular form of self-deception that allows a person to look at something that is obviously unfinished and declare it done because a machine told them it was.

The font matters. The formatting matters. The extra fifteen minutes matter. What you and I think matters. And the willingness to look at your own work with the same skepticism you bring to everyone else’s, that matters most of all.

But this is not an AI problem. This is a human problem. And it was a human problem even before AI existed, and it will be a human problem long after the current tools are replaced by whatever comes next. I just don’t need to keep theorizing about the tools to make the point anymore.

See you again next week. Same place, broader topics. Sometimes, and probably often, AI. Hopefully still interesting.

Ashley Heron
Managing Director, CommaEight