AI versus Marshy 71 - 3 predictions for the next 3 years

Ahoy and welcome to another edition of AI versus Marshy!

It’s the newsletter that charts AI through the lens of impact, growth, and technology.

It’s learn-in-public style, readers say they love the deep-dives, opinions, and dissembling of information that takes place here because it’s genuine, thought-out, and not full of crap.

I was thinking about what to write about this week, and thought I’d put to paper some predictions based on what I am seeing as a freelance consultant.

Like all predictions, they’re fallible, but I will say I’ve seen enough now to be pretty comfortable with these over a 12-24 month timeframe.

1. Lead generation is going to get much harder

There’s been a FLOOD of tools hitting the market since generative AI hit the mainstream.

5 years ago, if you wanted to run a cold email campaign with a solid lead list, you would need to buy hideously priced data that was farmed from Zoominfo, and pay an obscene amount for mass email software.

You’d have to invest a decent amount of time, effort, and headcount into copywriting, and you might have been able to hit 1,000 prospects in a month.

The response rate for something like this might be 1 out of 20, and because that’s 50 conversations, you could make the obscene costs work because you would be able to secure 5-15 deals off the back of your $10-50k tech stack investment.

That is no longer the case in cold email.

But that proliferation of technology colours everything a person sees online.

Reply bots.

LinkedIn posts.

Emails.

Text messages.

AI avatar-generated videos.

Some of this has made parts of the open (and closed) web easier to work with, but the vast majority of has increased the amount of slop, spam, and noise.

Google’s lawyers acknowledges the open web is in decline.

By their own lawyers 😢

Sam Altman (OpenAI) has given more credit to dead Internet theory.

You don’t say

(Sidebar: dark forest theory takes this to the logical next progression, first mentioned in AIvsM edition #35).

These people are leaders of some of the most powerful technology companies in the world and they’re acknowledging it’s getting worse.

So how is that going to work out for the rest of us?

Especially practitioners who have built a career from selling and marketing in the digital space?

The noise “problem” is going to increase and the winners will either move faster than the market in embracing the cutting edge, or buck the trend by doubling down on really traditional lead generation - handwritten notes, personal and private event invitations, conferences, and even door-to-door.

I’ve leaned into the cutting edge of tech side of things but aren’t in love with it, and have secretly fantasised about a handwritten letter business that you can only become a part of via mail order.

There’s something to be said for pausable, deliberate, and careful articulation of a missive to an audience that is absolutely CRAVING authentic communication.

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2. Digital marketing will look completely different in 3 years time

You might have seen this one coming.

If the above is happening, how do you ensure you get cut through with messaging at scale?

Well - you still can - it will just look very different.

​Mark Zuckerberg’s end goal:

“The basic end goal here is any business can come to us, say what their objective is — we get new customers to do this thing, or sell these things — tell us how much they’re willing to pay to achieve those results, connect their bank account, and then we just deliver as many results as we can,” he explained. “In a way, it’s kind of like the ultimate business results machine. I think it’d be one of the most important and valuable AI systems that gets built.”

This is a Australian recent job ad for a “startup generalist”:

A lot more people than ONE used to do these things

HyperVentures is a growth-stage accelerator and its founder recently trashed CMOs and the system we’re in:

14 months of average tenure

Way back in 2023 I wrote a piece for Athnya called “there’s never been a better time” and the advice still holds.

I’m an optimist if nothing else!

The reality right now is, you can do more with less people and more machine.

Most businesses right now at terrible at this - with moves like “replace an SEO specialist with an SEO agent” hurrr.

How long does something like that last for?

Andre’s a founder that is doing something different.

I was going to quote LinkedIn at some point - deal with it 😎

He’s building SEO playbooks that don’t exist yet.

Vibe coding indexing, doing complete website rebuilds based on what gets the most traction, and experimenting at an enviable pace.

I’m telling you this is hard to do with ANY WEBSITE - let alone a software making lots of money.

This “game” is adapting to what’s out there, spinning up new ways of doing things, and keeping what works.

This isn’t new - there’s just new ways to do it.

Sage wisdom from a decade ago

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This is from the book Traction - it was published 10 years ago 😉

And if you’re wondering if you’ve heard of this book before, I goofed around with a video review of it months ago:

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Funnily enough in the video I give “viral marketing” a D - I’d pump it up to S or A-tier now because of ways you can game organic social with generated content now.

3. The inequality gap will increase

There’s nothing “more accessible” about tools that are accessible via the web and require expensive subscriptions to get the most benefit.

The “democratisation of opportunity” is hype bait that is sold to the broader market in order to maximise capitalisation.

The most popular tools are running on borrowed capital and debt - meaning if they’re inaccessible to some now, the price of that accessibility needs to go up in order to pay back that debt.

What that world is betting on is economic breakthroughs the world has never seen before.

This event may transpire in our liftimes (I believe it will) but things are going to get shittier for most people before that happens.

There are people much smarter than me who are experts in economics.

But here’s the latest world income inequality data:

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2025 data hasn’t arrived yet, but it will be grim.

History also hasn’t been kind towards technology breakthroughs in terms of creating wealth for all.

Because I’m not an expert - I asked Perplexity to provide me with some historical examples of where things haven’t gone well.

Yes I’m REALLY aware of the irony here

And because there’s bias in everything - I asked it to provide me with the counterpoint.

In debate - you know you have someone on the hook when they’re adding qualifying language to an argument.

It’s weak because the argument isn’t strong enough to stand without qualification.

LLMs can’t “think” - they just infer information probablistically based on what’s likely going to be the next best answer.

But if they could - they’d be looking at this counter argument and thinking - hmmm, this isn’t good.

Under the right conditions

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That’s it for this week.

On the personal front I’ve been talking to few companies about roles and looking for something that’s great fit while at the same time manging my consulting clients.

It’s weird doing both but I’m just rolling with it.

A potential customer saw my LinkedIn post about looking for bigger roles as well.

I was upfront and said “hey - here’s the deal and what I’m looking for and I can’t control all of the outcomes”.

He called me yesterday saying he appreciated the honesty and wants to work together if we can.

It’s Grand Final Holiday here in Melbourne and school holidays so things a bit quiet.

I’ll probably finish early today and am looking forward to watching the AFL match tomorrow.

Thanks!

-Marshy

p.s. I learned how to fix fences last Friday with G and we went out to paddocks and learned knots and repair techniques. I love that this kind of stuff is so far away from my normal day-to-day 🤣

It’s kind of hard to tie the knots with wires and I’ll never look at a farm fence the same way again