What Work Looks Like Now

I’ve been working in marketing and advertising for the last 15 years.

For most of that time, the work looked similar. Open a few ad platforms. Understand the analytics. Tell stories. Design strategies to drive growth for our clients. The tools changed, the channels multiplied, but the shape of the day stayed roughly the same.

The last seven months broke that pattern.

My day-to-day now looks nothing like it did just a year ago. And I want to be precise about why, because it’s easy to wave at “AI” as the answer and miss what actually changed.

Using AI Was Never the Unlock

AI isn’t new to me. I was already using it a few years back, leading the digital marketing team at Decathlon. Generating copy, speeding up research, cleaning up data. Useful, but incremental. It made the existing job faster. It didn’t change the job.

So when people ask what shifted for me this year, “I started using AI more” is the wrong answer. I was already using it plenty.

What changed was that I got comfortable building.

Not just prompting a chatbot and copying the output into a doc. Building systems, software, tools, and actual capabilities on top of frontier models. Pushing on what these systems can do for us, and how much value we can pull out of them when we stop treating them like a search box and start treating them like something we can construct with.

That’s a different relationship with the technology. And it changed everything downstream.

The Claude Code Moment

If I had to point to a single unlock, it’s getting comfortable with Claude Code.

It has completely changed how I run both my personal and professional life, and I don’t say that lightly. It moved AI from something I consult to something I build with.

The gap between those two things is enormous, and it’s the gap most people haven’t crossed yet.

Once you’re building, the question stops being “what can this tool do for me today?” It becomes “what do I want to exist, and can I make it?” More often than not lately, the answer is yes.

Two Sides of the Same Shift

The change shows up in two places.

On the personal side, my AI agents deep dive into my finances, deal with customer service, and handle the stuff I genuinely don’t want to do. It’s not glamorous. It’s the admin, the follow-ups, the digging through statements. (My agent still can’t do the dishes or fold the laundry, so I’m not fully off the hook at home.)

On the professional side, it goes deeper. I’m automating a lot of the execution: analysis, data processing, sourcing new opportunities to speak and share knowledge. I have systems built for nearly every recurring task, so the time it takes to go from idea to first draft is fast and efficient.

That last part is the quiet revolution. When the distance between an idea and a working first version collapses, you stop rationing your ideas. You just build them and see.

What This Means for the Rest of Us

Here’s the part I’d sit with if you’re a marketer watching this from the outside.

The competitive line is no longer “do you use AI.” Almost everyone does now. The line is whether you’ve moved from using to building. From consuming outputs to constructing systems that produce those outputs for you, on repeat, without you in the loop each time.

You don’t need to become an engineer. I’m not one. What you need is the willingness to sit with a tool like Claude Code or Codex, pick one annoying recurring task, and build the thing that handles it. Then do it again next week. The skill compounds faster than you’d expect, because each system you build teaches you how to build the next one.

Start with something small and personal. The finances. The customer service emails. The weekly report you dread. Get one system working end to end. That first one is the toggle. Once you’ve felt the difference between using and building, you don’t go back.

The work isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting, from doing the task to designing the system that does the task. And the people who make that shift are going to look up in a year and realize their day looks nothing like it used to.

Mine already does.

Does yours look any different than it did a year ago?