AI Can Make Output, But Only Humans Build Strategy

The conversation starts with a candid pivot: we turned the mic on our own shop to explain why we stepped back from day-to-day marketing, spent two years pressure-testing AI, and then chose to expand with a human-first, full-service model. Not to wage war on technology, but to fix the widening gap between fast output and real strategy. As leaders embraced DIY tools and automation, sameness crept in — copy with the same cadence, visuals with the same gloss, funnels without context. We name the problem, map how it happened, and lay out a better way forward.

You’ll hear a quick tour through AI’s long arc — from Turing to transformers — and why mainstream access didn’t suddenly grant machines judgment. We share what our clients actually struggled with during the noisy years: operations, cash flow, hiring, and decision fatigue. That’s the hinge most growth turns on. When the inside is messy, no channel can save it. When the core is clear, every campaign gets lighter and more effective. That’s why we fuse consulting with creative: brand identity with depth, search visibility that compounds, and advertising built from positioning rather than templates.

We get specific about how we use AI — and how we don’t. Tools help us research faster, think wider, and evaluate options. Humans do the architecture. Strategy, creative direction, message/market fit, and judgment stays in human hands. The result is marketing that carries identity, operations that can deliver the promise, and campaigns that convert because they’re rooted in reality, not generic patterns. If you’re experimenting with AI, keep going, but ask the hard question: is it building strategy or just producing output?

If you’re ready for signal over noise and a partner who rolls up sleeves, explores your constraints, and ships work with a point of view, we’d love to connect. Subscribe for more candid conversations, share this with a fellow owner who’s feeling the AI fatigue, and leave a review to tell us what part hit home.

Be sure to follow or subscribe!  And, if you're a local business owner who'd like to be featured - or know someone whose story should be told - get in touch at Ken@StrategicHorizonsConsulting.com

This show is brought to you by Strategic Horizons Consulting (a division of Ken Collins Marketing).

Transcript

Pandemic Noise And Market Shifts

Serious AI Testing Begins

Clients’ Real Pain: Operations

Stepping Back From Marketing

A Brief History Of AI

The Gap Between Output And Strategy

Reentering With Human-Crafted Services

Full-Service Offer And Consulting

Call To Connect And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 1:05

Welcome! Today's episode is a little different. Instead of stepping behind the counter of another local business, we're stepping behind the counter of my own. I want to talk about an industry pivot that happened in 2024. What I observed over the two years leading up to it, and why Kim Collins marketing is now expanding in a direction that might surprise some people. And that this wasn't a reactive decision, emotional, anything like that. It was studied. And I think the lessons apply to every business owner listening. So backing up a bit, uh Ken Collins Marketing was founded in 2015. Before that, I co-founded a marketing agency in 2009. And when that partnership ended, I built Ken Collins Marketing as a more focused strategic version of what I believed marketing should be, or at least my flavor of it. We were doing uh focusing mostly on website development, search visibility, bland uh brand clarity, um uh campaign structure, that sort of thing. And then 2020 happened and everything changed. Um so when the lockdowns hit, um, the business landscape shifted like almost immediately, and everything got really noisy. So for about two years, um it was hard to hear what anybody was saying. It was uh just a lot of noise about the lockdowns, about uh uh the pandemic, um all that kind of thing. And um by 2020, that noise started to kind of settle down, and something else started started rising. AI. So in 2022, I started testing AI, um, different platforms and serious tests, um, real-world tests. So I wasn't doing it casually. It was it wasn't for headlines, it was just a systematic testing of things like graphic design AIs and large language models and evaluation tools and AI phone agents and automation workflows and um and all that kind of thing. So I wasn't dismissing AI and I wasn't fearing it, I was studying it. And while testing, um, I was also having deeper conversations with clients, and those conversations weren't about marketing, um, they were more so about business, like operations, cash flow, hiring, um, decision fatigue, uh, strategic confusion. And something started to become clear to me, marketing wasn't their biggest friction point. Sure, I was helping them with marketing, um, but that wasn't the things that were, those weren't the things that were plaguing their minds. Um, operational and strategic edges were were where they were running into rough patches. So from 2024 to 2026, I largely pulled back from the marketing industry, um, not necessarily because of AI, um, but partially because of AI. Um, but it was truly because I believed I it would replace much of what agencies, marketing agencies um were doing, and I wanted to be where I could help the most. So I shifted towards smoothing out operational and strategical edges and um inside of businesses and really digging into the operations of a business, just not just the marketing that they needed for that business. And so what I observed during that two years where I wasn't just focused so focused so heavily on marketing and just focusing on businesses, it gave me some breathing room and something interesting happened. Um, I start also started noticing phrases emerging like AI slup. And why was that phrase emerging? Because man, it is everywhere, everybody's excited about AI, um, it's controlling the conversation, and everybody's using it. And um the results of people using it are not always great. Professionals using it um can actually pull a pretty pretty impressive result out of them, but we're seeing you know, AI videos and AI images, and you know, still uh with all these advancements in AI, it's still having trouble figuring out how many fingers or arms a human being has. Uh so anyway, I started noticing this AI slop catchphrase out there, and and along with it, a growing anti-AI sentiment, um just frustration with generic content. Basically, like I said, it's just everywhere, um, and from just fatigue from from automation overload. And at the same time, I started to realize something uh that I was playing a part of this thing. I had become one of the agencies that stepped back um in the face of AI. So, because I assumed that landscape was fundamentally replacing us. So, graphic designers pulled back, there just doesn't seem to be as many people out there doing actual real graphic design anymore. Um, several things pulled back, and everybody's turning to AI. So this is happening either because or or agencies are pulling back because of AI, or AI is filling the hole left behind by agencies pulling back. Um it seems to depend on the agency and their situation, which one of those areas they fall into. But regardless of where they fall, a gap was forming. And and that gap just kept getting more and more visible to me over time. Um, and I'll explain that gap. But before we do, let's take a step back in time. So since we're we're talking a little bit about AI here, um, I just want to zoom out. Um, AI didn't appear in 2022, it's been here for decades. Uh in 1950, Alan Turing um proposed the Turing test. And for those of you, it's been around long enough that you should have at least heard about the Turing test, but basically the Turing test uh was a test of can a person have a conversation with a computer and not realize they're having a conversation with conversation with a computer? Would they mistake a computer for a comp for a person? Now, in a nutshell, that was what the Turing test was. And then um in it wasn't until 1956 the term artificial intelligence was coined. So then people started using um artificial intelligence to describe this sort of technology. And in the 60s, we had Eliza, it was uh an early version of a chatbot. Um, and then in the 70s, things I think mostly went quiet as far as AI went. Um, and I think that was mostly because expectations of AI were far exceeding the actual capability of AI. So I think there was a lot of disinterest in it. But then in the 80s and 90s, technology started changing. Um, and so by the time we hit 97, uh, we had an AI uh called Deep Blue that defeated uh Russian grandmaster, I think, uh chess chess guy. So he defeated defeated Gary Kasparov in chess. And then by 2011, we had another AI named Watson who won Jeopardy. So you may may or may not remember those headlines hitting uh where those things happened, but it was kind of a side conversation, still wasn't mainstream. And then in 2012, we had some deep learning breakthroughs that kind of accelerated image record recognition. And then in 2017, the transformer architecture kind of changed the game, and without going too far into that, basically it's just how AIs learn. So the way they learn uh was drastically sped up and improved, and then 2022 happened, and that's when Chat GPT, I believe, um, entered the mainstream, and I equate that entry into the mainstream sort of like the iPhone hitting the mainstream in 2007, or maybe not hitting mainstream yet, but it was introduced in 2007, and that seriously changed everything. So I was dragging around um cell phones will in the mid-90s. So um, and people had BlackBerries and all this technology, they had all these things that they could actually communicate. The cell phones were bigger, and then they started to get smaller. I think Motorola had a flip phone. Um, so I had one of those flip phones, and um uh, but then when the iPhone came out, it made those things mainstream. It took the use of cell phones um that were previously only used by say power geeks and these power people. It was a little bit of a status symbol and and all that kind of thing, and it put it into the mainstream. So now um mom and dad and husband and wife and kids all have cell phones at this point, so it's pretty mainstream. So um I think that's just a parallel to kind of chat GPT and what it did for the conversation revolving around AI. It was no longer a scientific venture, it was no longer in labs and being studied and and uh developed behind the scenes. Um, it was part of the mainstream conversation and available for you and me and everybody, again, mom and dad and husband and wife and kids, to just use this system. So it was accessible. Uh and so it didn't suddenly become intelligent. The technology cut off caught up to at least the concept of AI, and um, and it's just really, really ballooning. So uh more computer power, more data volume, more GPU acceleration, uh cloud infrastructure, all these things kind of amplified AI's capabilities. And that's what created the wave, not not magic, not you know, just scale, basically. Um, so the gap I started to see during my two years, 2022 to now, um, and also during testing and listening and watching, and I started to notice patterns. Um, AI produces output, but output on its own is not strategy, it's just output. So AI writes copy, but it doesn't understand positioning, nuance in a local market. Um, it doesn't understand those things. And so it can generate logos, not always well, but it doesn't interview your leadership team and extract identity and all that kind of thing. So um it'll create blog posts, but it doesn't um it doesn't architect like long-term funnel strategies and ecosystems and and so basically many businesses began leaning heavily on AI tools to reduce costs because instead of hiring somebody and paying fees for all this stuff, you could just jump on AI and it would spit things out for you, and then you could do that, and it was a lot easier, it was a lot cheaper, and and that. So more and more of that started to happen, and and that's when we started to hear phrases come forward like AI slop. So, and the reason for that is is everything started to sound familiar, the same cadence, the same phrasing, same structure, same energy, same types of images, um, all that. So, again, that's when kind of AI slop as a phrase started appearing, and it's it wasn't because AI is useless, it was because AI without human architecture, you know, it it produces surface level volume. So, again, it can spit out a lot of stuff really quickly for you, but there's no human architecture behind all of that content, all those images, all that written words, all that stuff. Um, and volume without direction, build it doesn't build brands. So, my position on this, I'm not anti-AI. I still test AI tools, and I actually use AI on a pretty much daily basis for internal research, brainstorming, um, productivity um enhancements, uh, evaluation, um workflow efficiency, you know, those sorts of things. Um, and the reason for that is it's a powerful tool. It's sped me up in the amount of things I can get done in a day. Um, but we don't use AI as a replacement for human experience, insight, creativity, ingenuity. Um, we don't use AI for client strategy, for our for the graphic design projects we do for clients, for campaign business. We don't use AI for any of the things that we produce for clients. Um, because marketing isn't just production, it's interpretation, it's psychology, it's long-term pattern recognition, it's judgment. And as far as I'm concerned, judgment is still human. So by stepping back from marketing, I unintentionally helped create a gap in the market. Agencies started to pull back, uh, DIY tools expanded, um, AI accelerated. Um, but business owners still need things like clarity and architecture and positioning and human differentiation. And there so the anti-AI sentiment wasn't really about AI. It was about loss of quality. And that's why the name AI slop. It was about loss of identity, loss of voice, and um that's when I knew it was time to it wasn't time to retreat from from marketing. It was it was time to re-enter marketing um in a larger way. So um, but with but this time with sharper clarity. So we didn't just reintroduce our marketing services, we expanded them. Um, in our services, our human-powered design, human-crafted strategy, campaign architecture, brand development with depth, search visibility engineered with long-term logic, um, advertising built from positioning, not templates. So AI is a tool inside the workshop, but it's not the architect. Um, we use tools, but we don't let the tools replace us and our experience and knowledge and ability to think and reason. So if you're experimenting with AI in your business, that's that's not a mistake. It's it's smart to explore tools, but ask yourself um before using it at too much of a scale, is is what it's producing for you? Is it building strategy or is it just producing output? And there's a difference. So over the past two years, that difference has become clearer than ever. Um my pullback from marketing temporarily wasn't a retreat, it was a study, and now it's an expansion. So um, take a look at uh at uh the website. Um, some of you may know Strategic Horizons Consulting is officially a division of Ken Collins Marketing, so that's where it operates. And uh so Ken Collins Marketing is still there, but going to the website now, you'll see drastically expanded list of services and areas like design and marketing and advertising and all that kind of stuff. And again, um I have a list of contractors that I work with, and those people have experience and knowledge and have worked with a lot of uh different types of businesses, and they're using their own brain power to produce produce results for for our clients, um, along with me. I mean, I'm one of the guys in the workroom doing stuff, so um, I am definitely not an AI, I am a person, and I have a lot of experience, a lot of knowledge, all packed in my head. And so that combined with my team, we're ready. We're ready to help you with uh pretty much anything you got going. At this point, we're we're kind of all uh uh full service. So if you need flyers designed, we've got you. If you need a website design, we've got you there. If you need search engine optimization to make sure people can find your website um in your business, we've got you there. Um, if you need um agents waiting 24-7 to talk to people through your website, we've got you covered there. Um, social media management, um, social ads, Google ads, whatever. Um, but again, we're we're still focused heavily on on business consulting. So if you your needs revolve around hiring, firing, um, just basically employee management, uh operations, um all that kind of stuff. On the consulting side, you get me and only me, unless I, for very specific rare occasions, need to call in a subject matter expert, then there'll be somebody else involved. But I'm the guy doing all the thinking, all the working, and I roll up my sleeves and dig around in your business and help you do stuff. I don't just create a binder for you, give you an inspirational speech, um, a thumbs up, good luck, and walk out the door. I roll up my sleeves, stand there side by side with you and help you get these things done. So, whatever your need in business, period, whether it be marketing or digging around within the operations of your business to make improvements and generate more revenue and a higher valuation for your business. Uh give me a call. I'm here. Just go to KenCollinsMarketing.com and take a look around. Just browse the site, reach out. Um, costs you nothing to reach out and have a conversation. And I love having conversations with business owners. So that is kind of the journey I've been on, and um why the seesaw to some. Uh I was getting even uh responses back from people saying that, oh, yeah, of course, you've retired or you are retiring. And no, no, no, no, that is far from the truth. I am very much involved in um a lot of things and um not retiring. In fact, just um kind of kicked Ken Collins Marketing square in the butt and got that engine um up and running again. And we are offering a lot more than we ever have at this point, and have a team of uh depending on what's going on, 20 to 40 or so contractors that are ready to help me implement the things that you need in your business. Um, unless you just need somebody to come in and help you clean the joint up, and then I'm your guy. I'm there. Um I've got my sleeves rolled up and and we'll get it done. So uh yeah, anyway, hit the website kencollinsmarketing.com and thanks for listening, and uh we'll have another guest on next week. Thanks.