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The companion
When radio arrived, we were promised we'd become transparent heaps of jelly. Trains would melt women at thirty miles an hour. Teachers struck over calculators. Every generation gets a technology to panic about, and this one is ours, so if you're feeling weird and daunted, welcome to your humanity. The sane response isn't refusal, it's informed participation: the train has left the station, and the one thing nobody has commoditised yet is taste.
1. Give Pomelli your homepage
Google Labs' Pomelli reads your website, extracts your “business DNA” (logo, fonts, colours, tone), then generates end-to-end social campaigns from it. It won't be perfect, but ten minutes of tweaking buys you a month of creative and skips the Canva drudge work.
Leader's note: Use it for the starting template, never the finished product. The gap between the two is where your brand lives.
2. Order quantity, apply taste
AI's superpower is quantity. Your Claude is thirsty, like a Labrador: throw it the prompt and it will retrieve a thousand posts. What hasn't been commoditised is knowing which three are any good.
“Give me 100 Instagram post concepts for [campaign]. Vary the angle, the format and the tone. Number them. I'll pick the few worth building on.”
Leader's note: This only works if you're the expert. Novices look at AI output and think it's great. Experts look at it and know which of it is ropey. Taste is the filter, and the filter is you.
3. The data-security mirror
When a room is scared of AI and data, don't argue. Reflect. Do you put documents in Google Drive? Then you can put data into Gemini. Do you put your accounts into Xero? You already trust cloud tools with everything. Meanwhile “I emailed the report to my personal address” happens every day.
1. The ambiguity audit
Kirsty's training rule: any ambiguity will always be perceived negatively. Text someone “I've got 10 minutes for a quick chat” and they hear “you're in trouble.” Reread the last five messages you sent your team. Find every ambiguous line a nervous person could read as a threat, and rewrite it so they can't.
2. Welcome to your humanity
After a talk that got amazing feedback, Henry's brain invented a stranger texting Kirsty to say he was rubbish. Entirely fabricated. We evolved to be terrified, and in extreme change your brain will manufacture threats to be terrified of. Next time yours does, write the fear down and ask: is this evidence, or is this fabrication? Then ask what your team's brains are fabricating about AI, and what you've done to answer it.
3. Extend or displace
People don't hate AI-made things, they hate lazy ones. People will take AI-created things as long as they're still good and creative and thoughtful. The fruit Love Island went viral; the Coca-Cola Christmas ad got boycott threats, because Coke can obviously afford humans. List where your team uses AI, and sort each into “extends what we could never have done” or “shortcuts what we should do ourselves.” Keep the first list. Interrogate the second.
Transcript coming soon. It will live right here, in full, for every episode.