Looking at my phone and having a lovely scroll fills me with a kind of guilt. Right now, I'm deep in a handful of complex, exciting client projects. And phone time means I’m not working on them. 

But when I do, invariably, my feed is full of amazing people I follow who are doing incredible things with AI. You know the ones I mean. They’re the people who appear to spectacularly have their shit together with AI:

I’m proud of what we are building and what we’re achieving with AI. But when I’m mid-scroll, late on a deadline night, when I should be working… I get an unsettling feeling bordering on outright horror. 

This is the version of AI FOMO that doesn't get talked about enough. It's not just the fear of losing your job to AI. 

It's the fear that somewhere, while you're heads-down shipping, someone is building something that will 10x or 100x their business. And you can't see it because the cognitive state required to discover transformative possibilities is incompatible with the cognitive state required to do serious work.

I'm reading The Science of Storytelling by Will Storr at the moment. It's excellent.
But I'm not reading it the way I normally would.
I mentioned we’re working on some great projects. One is a brand project. I’m a big fan of going back to classic texts when these types of projects come along. And it’s changing how I read the book.

When I pick up a book with no immediate project attached, my mind wanders. It makes unexpected connections. It follows interesting threads sideways. There's a quality of breadth to it, a kind of exploratory openness that's hard to manufacture deliberately.

And I'm reading Storr differently. I'm scanning for what's directly relevant. Zooming in on the concepts I can use this week. The same book, the same sentences, but a narrower beam.
Neither mode is wrong. They're just different cognitive states. Depth mode ships the project. Breadth mode finds what changes everything. (These are not official names; I just made them up.)

You can't run both at once.

I was at a marketing conference, “Marketers Day” on Friday. It was brilliant. But both versions of AI FOMO were present in the same room.

One-half of the anxiety was familiar: job fear. 

Pew Research recently found that more workers are worried about AI than hopeful about it. The American Psychological Association reports that 38% of psychologists fear their role will become obsolete. ADP found that only 35% of C-suite executives feel their roles are secure. The worry runs all the way up the org chart. 

That undertow is at play, and people openly discussed it at Marketers Day. 

The other half was different. There were AI innovators in that room building genuinely extraordinary things. Custom platforms. Sophisticated models. Capabilities that made you feel behind just sitting there. 

Right now, I'm power-using AI intensely on my two biggest client projects. But not on some wild, custom-built platform. One of its most fundamental capabilities: reading unstructured language at scale.

Interviews, recorded conversations, and forum discussions. The actual words customers use to describe their own problems.

Building a picture of your customer has always been constrained by time and resources. You could only read so many interviews, digest so many threads. AI removes that ceiling entirely. What used to take weeks of synthesis now surfaces in hours, and the quality of insight is deeper because the volume of input is larger.

But it doesn't remove the judgment. Someone still has to decide which insight is signal and which is noise. Someone still has to make the intuitive bet on messaging. AI gives you a richer portrait. The human decides what to do with it.

The insights are outstanding. But they’re meaningless without human oversight. 

Back to another literary reference: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.

That poem is misread as a tribute to the bold individualist who picks the clever path and wins. 

But Frost says plainly the two roads were worn "really about the same." The poem isn't about the road. It's about the story we tell ourselves afterwards. The retrospective meaning we assign to choices that were, at the time, fairly arbitrary.

Walking the road hard is depth mode. Scouting other roads is breadth mode. Frost's speaker doesn't stand at the fork indefinitely. He commits. Which means he necessarily stops surveying alternatives.

Or to put it another way: no certain path exists. Worrying about everyone else's road doesn't build yours.

Get back to your desk! That product is not going to ship itself. That client deadline isn’t getting further away.  

But if, in the meantime, you want to take a step back and think through where AI and marketing can do strategic work in your business, I'd like that conversation.

Always forward, Dave