In Part 1, Ty Gates showed us how advertising can fight back…

Now, for Part 2, we bring in the heavy artillery: Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, author, and behavioural science star.

Does Rory think we’ve entered a post-brand era? Absolutely not. In fact, he argues brands are the essential “Darwinian feedback mechanism” of capitalism - and even Galloway himself can’t escape buying brands when he thinks he’s just buying utility.

In this episode, Rory takes direct aim at the current corporate obsession with using AI and tech simply to slash budgets. As he bluntly puts it: “It’s not cost saving if you’re making your customer pay the price.”

Along with dismantling the cost-cutting panacea, we go down a few other great rabbit holes:

☝ AI’s True Potential: Why using AI just to replace jobs on a 1-to-1 basis is the most boring, stupid use case - and why founders are more likely to use it to create entirely new forms of value exchange.

✌ The “Tight Fitness Function”: How narrow financial metrics and the need for constant quarterly reporting are destroying business biodiversity and making companies less innovative.

🤟 The Star Bar Effect: Rory’s favourite chocolate bar and what we can learn from it…

(Bonus: If you want even more of Rory’s genius after this episode, check out his classic TED Talk, “Perspective is Everything” 🧠)

That was Scott Galloway’s recent provocation. While he praised Anthropic’s brilliant Super Bowl ad as a potential “1984 Apple ad moment” for the AI revolution, he ultimately dismissed it as a temporary “blip” for the ad industry, arguing that tech, utility, and algorithms have permanently defeated brand and creativity.

But have we really entered a post-brand era?

To answer that, we’re dedicating a special two-part series of The Rabbit Hole Experience to tackling Scott’s challenge! 🕳️🐇

To kick off Part 1, I went straight to the source. I sat down with Ty Gates, Communications Director at Mother - the very agency behind that Anthropic ad (and recently named Ad Age’s Indie Global Ad Network of the Year! 🏆).

We used the massive cultural footprint of Mother’s work for Anthropic to explore how the ad world can fight back - not by fighting tech, but by learning from it. As Ty points out in the clip below, advertising has a speed problem. We need to stop taking 9 months to launch campaigns while tech companies ship new code every day.

Along with the need for speed, we went down a few other great rabbit holes:

☝ Business Value over Cannes Lions: Why agencies lost their seat in the boardroom, and how they can win it back by speaking the language of conversions instead of just vanity metrics.

🤘 The “Anthropic Effect”: Why the tech VC narrative of “AI replacing humans” is wrong, and how creatives are using it to execute at the speed of culture.

🤟 The Death of the “Push” Ad: Why traditional deception-based advertising is dead, and how modern brands are winning through authentic branded entertainment.

1. The Enterprise Level (WPP Open): The unified operating system for your business. It plugs directly into fixed workflows, elevating the traditional model of “People + Process” to “People + Process + The One Platform.”

2. The Individual Level: A personalised ecosystem where you build your own intellectual property (like my personal AI, Dr. Raibbit). It’s where I store recorded meetings, synthesize thought leadership (like WARC’s Multiplier Effect), and plug in the cultural touchstones that inspire me - whether that’s Interstellar, Alice in Wonderland, Fight Club or The Matrix.

The Philosophy: “And, Not Or”

The defining rule of the Exobrain is that it must always be an “And,” never an “Or.” Everything across people, process, and platform must be accumulative. Having an Exobrain that knows every piece of trivia about The Matrix doesn’t mean you stop your tradition of watching it every year. Recording a meeting with your Exobrain doesn’t mean you stop actively listening or taking notes. The Exobrain is additive; it deepens human engagement rather than outsourcing it.

The Market Trap: The “Efficiency Road”

When you look at the broader market right now, there is a massive fixation on the “Or.” Most companies are looking at AI purely through the lens of efficiency, cost-cutting, and replacement. The conversation is usually framed as a trade-off: “Should we use this OR that to get this done?”

But if your only goal is to drive the cost down to arrive at the exact same answer you had yesterday, you are trapped. We’ve made this mistake before in previous digital eras - chasing pure efficiency at the complete expense of perceptual value and true creativity.

If we approach AI with that same mindset, we are just sprinting down a dead-end street. To borrow a moment from The Matrix, think of the scene in the pouring rain when Neo is about to get out of the car…

“Please, Neo, you have to trust me. Because you have been down there, Neo. You know that road. You know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.”

We know exactly where the road of pure efficiency and cost-cutting ends: commoditisation and a total loss of creative value. It is not a mistake we can afford to make again in the AI world.

Instead of asking what we can replace to get the same answer, we must ask: “Now that we have this technology, what are the additional things we can do that were previously impossible?” By layering AI on top of human expertise, we aren’t just getting answers faster - we are generating net positive new answers.

The Internet Age vs. The AI Age

To understand why this “And” mindset is critical right now, we have to look at how the AI Age differs from the Internet Age.

In the Internet Age, we had access to all the world’s knowledge, but we still had to hunt for it. We had to find the disparate pieces of information, stitch them together ourselves, and frame a story.

Today, in the AI Age, digital intelligence does the stitching for us. We can ask a highly specific question and instantly get an answer that is perfectly framed, formatted, and pieced together. But this incredible capability hides a trap. Because everyone now has access to this all-knowing digital intelligence, simply getting an answer is no longer a competitive advantage.

The Danger of the Perfect Answer (and the Messiness of Purpose)

The great danger of the AI Age is the temptation to hand over all responsibility to the digital intelligence, get the perfectly framed answer, and then blindly execute it.

But true purpose - and the real-world processes required to achieve it - isn’t mathematical. It isn’t as clean or precise as the Keymaker just cutting a perfect key for a perfect door. Purpose and process are inherently messy.

This is exactly why platform technology cannot just be plugged in “off the shelf.” If you buy a generic AI tool and expect it to flawlessly run your business, you will fail. The platform doesn’t know your purpose. It doesn’t know the nuances of your people or the intricate, messy reality of your specific workflows.

Think about the Oracle. When Neo goes to see her, she doesn’t hand him a straightforward instruction manual or a simple, off-the-shelf key. They meet in a messy kitchen. She tells him what he needs to hear, forces him to introspect, and leaves the actual choice up to him. She guides him, but he has to find his own answer and decide how to walk the walk.

In the exact same way, your People and your Process must actively find their way with the Platform. Your Exobrain can generate a thousand perfectly formatted answers in seconds. But you cannot just blindly accept the first one. You have to bring the human messiness of purpose to the table. You have to look at the AI’s output and ask: Is this the best answer? Is there a different question we should be asking? How will our people actually walk the walk once this decision is made?

The WPP M-Shaped Person: Walking Informs Knowing

To navigate this messiness and get a net positive new answer out of your Exobrain, you need to understand the profound nuances of the AI’s output. You need to know the depth required to bring that answer to reality. In WPP, we call this being an M-shaped person.

You have to be a practical, action-oriented problem solver who has actually done the work. Ironically, it is the act of walking the path in the real world that allows you to use your Exobrain to know the right path. Your human, hands-on experience gives you the intuition to navigate the messiness, interrogate the AI, challenge its assumptions, and flip the question entirely.

The Matrix Metaphor: Knowing vs. Walking the Path

AI will give you the map. It will give you the data, the efficiencies, and the perfectly framed answer. But as Morpheus tells Neo when he is processing everything the system has thrown at him:

“Neo, sooner or later, you’re going to realize just as I did... there’s a difference between knowing the path, and walking the path.”

Your Exobrain is there to help you know the path.

But you cannot just lean back, plug in an off-the-shelf tool, and expect to win. You need the grit, the sweat, and the real-time human adaptation to actually use what the machine gives you. You need the practical, M-shaped human experience to walk the path.

If your enterprise or personal brain isn’t lifting you up, pushing you to do better, and helping you create net positive new answers, you are doing “Or,” not “And.”

It takes the human to find the different answer. It is always And, never Or.

I have officially wrapped up my three-part series for WARC. It has been a deep journey down the rabbit hole, exploring a single, crucial concept that I believe defines the future of our industry: Interoperability.

If you are a WARC subscriber, you can read the full deep-dives here:

• Part 1: September 2023 = Today’s CMOs need to master the interoperability of their brand thinking

• Part 2: February 2024 = Interoperability and the open-source brand: Leveraging the power of community engagement

• Part 3: January 2026 = Interoperability and the programmable brand: The CMO as architect of autonomy

However, if you aren’t lucky enough to have a subscription, I’ve summarised the Interoperability Trilogy below.

Think of this like a classic cinema trilogy. A Back to the Future. It tells a complete story. Sure, there is a looming possibility of interoperability Part 4… likely about the interoperability between human consumers and their AI agents - but we must be careful. We don’t want to pull an Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and ruin the franchise just because we didn’t know when to stop.

So, for now, here is the comprehensive look at the Interoperable Brand: From Internal Culture 💫, to External Community 🎮, to Agentic Technology 🌐

The Premise: The first chapter tackles the “Inside Game.” Before a brand can connect seamlessly with the world, it has to connect seamlessly with itself.

The Problem: We are facing a crisis of influence. A Deloitte survey noted that only 17% of C-suite executives said they collaborated with the CMO in the last 12 months. Why? Because too often, marketing is viewed as the “coloring-in department” - a siloed function of storytelling rather than business logic. When the brand isn’t interoperable internally, the customer experience fractures. A great ad means nothing if the product experience or customer service doesn’t match the promise.

The Solution: The modern CMO must evolve from a Storyteller to a System Designer. We need to move toward an “M-Shaped” skill set - deep in brand strategy, but broad enough to speak the languages of finance and technology.

The Model: We looked back to move forward, analyzing Disney’s 1957 Synergy Map. Disney didn’t just make movies; they built an interoperable web where film fed music, music fed the parks, and parks fed merchandise.

The Lesson: The brand must be the operating system of the company. Whether it’s the rise and fall of the Nike+ Fuelband or the shift to “Disney as a Service,” the goal is to ensure the brand flows through every vein of the organisation - from IT to Sales.

The Premise: Once your internal OS is built, Part 2 looks outward. This is about making your brand “Open Source.”

The Shift: We are moving from a “Broadcast” era (one-to-many) to a “Multiplayer” era (many-to-many). The most resilient brands today don’t just talk to their customers; they provide a platform for customers to build on top of the brand.

The Comparison: We contrasted two giants: Disney vs. LEGO.

• Disney: Traditionally holds IP tight. While they have improved under Iger with acquisitions like Marvel, it is still largely a top-down, “read-only” relationship with fans.

• LEGO: The gold standard of interoperability. They invited the community in via platforms like Lego Ideas. They turned passive consumers into active co-creators. This didn’t just build loyalty; it saved them from bankruptcy.

The Application: You don’t have to be a giant to do this. We explored how:

• Hiki built a brand around the specific needs of sweat and mental health.

• Bumble differentiated via a “women-first” logic.

• The Farmer’s Dog used community feedback to carve out a niche in pet care.

Key Takeaway: The goal is to build an API for your brand. By creating “co-creation platforms” and promoting fan-led initiatives, you de-risk innovation and ensure your brand evolves at the speed of culture, not just the speed of your internal approval process.

The Premise: This brings us to the present (and the near future): The Agentic Era. As we enter 2026, interoperability is no longer just a cultural philosophy; it is a computational necessity.

The Frontier: In this final chapter, we look at how AI agents and automated workflows are changing the game. I spoke with Jennifer Stephens (formerly Roebuck) on The Rabbit Hole Experience, who framed it perfectly: “As a CMO, I see myself as a programmer.”

She doesn’t mean writing Python. She means acting as the “Architect of Autonomy.” In an agentic world, the CMO must define the Logic, the Constraints, and the Quality Thresholds of the brand. If you cannot explicitly code what “good” looks like, your AI agents will optimize for efficiency, not distinctiveness.

The Infrastructure: We explored the two types of plumbing needed to make this work:

• Proprietary Systems: Closed loops (like WPP Open) that offer speed and data privacy.

• Open Standards: The industry is rallying around the AdCP (Advertising Control Protocol). Just as the internet relies on HTTP, agentic advertising needs a standard language. Without it, we pay an “Integration Tax” every time we try to connect our internal tools to the broader publisher ecosystem.

The Framework: To make this practical, we introduced A.D.A.M. (Augmented Development of Agency Marketing). This is the operating model for the hybrid team:

• Phase 1: The Setup (Augmented Truth): Before humans even meet, AI agents ingest data to establish a “baseline of truth” regarding sentiment and competitors. Humans no longer argue about facts; they move straight to insight.

• Phase 2: The Logic (Synthetic Interoperability): We use Synthetic Audiences to test “Wild Card” creative ideas. Instead of picking the safe idea out of fear, we simulate how a bold idea performs against digital personas, de-risking innovation before production.

• Phase 3: The Execution: We strictly divide labor based on empathy. High Empathy Tasks (finding the “Native Idea” and cultural nuance) belong to humans. Low Empathy Tasks (versioning, formatting, resizing) are handed to agents.

Key Warning: We must avoid the “Laziness Loop.” If brands rely on off-the-shelf AI models trained on public data, they will regress into “pattern matching” - creating advertising that looks and sounds exactly like the competition. The “Programmer CMO” prioritises Reasoning over Rendering - using AI to verify strategy and enforce distinctiveness, rather than just generating generic assets at speed.

The End... For Now?

That concludes the Interoperability Trilogy.

We have moved from breaking down silos (Part 1), to opening up to the community (Part 2), to programming the logic for the AI era (Part 3).

Is there a Part 4? Maybe. As AI agents begin to negotiate media and make purchase decisions on behalf of consumers, we are going to face a new challenge: Interoperability between biological consumers and digital consumer enabling agents.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s digest the trilogy first. We can worry about the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull later.

We kick off the conversation discussing her concept of “One Stunt Shops” and how the industry’s obsession with tactical plays has evolved in the age of AI. We debate why the real value of these tools isn’t just about accelerating the same old playbooks, but imagining entirely new possibilities.

Here are some of the areas we explored:

☝ The 5x vs. 50x Mindset: Why we need to move beyond using AI merely for efficiency (the 5x) and start using it to unlock expansive imagination (the 50x).

🤘 Femininimity & The Fear of Laziness: We dive into Miriam’s honest talk on women in the workplace and discuss the skepticism strategists feel toward AI-specifically the fear that outsourcing thinking to a “black box” will make us intellectually lazy.

🤟 Lifelong Kindergarten: Drawing inspiration from the Nordic education system, we discuss why the future of strategy requires a “childlike” willingness to experiment, fail without consequence, and get comfortable with the uncomfortable.

🖖 The Death of the “Big Reveal”: How the agency-client relationship is shifting from “work-present-iterate” to a constant state of co-exploration from day one.

🖐 The Trap of the “Easy Average”: Why “good enough” is losing value. If everyone has the same tools to reach the average, the only value left is in the edge cases.

🤝 Strategy x Creative Convergence: Why the old model of the “smart” strategist handing off to the “wacky” creative is dead - today, strategy must be creative, and creative must be strategic.

👊 Discipline: Miriam argues that for the next generation of talent, the most critical new skill isn’t prompt engineering, but the discipline to stay focused amidst endless possibilities.

We are three episodes in, and there are some clear, consistent threads appearing. Last week, Jude Pullen spoke about “Incurable Curiosity,” and Scott Wilkinson touched on how we need to explore in a way that unlocks our more human side.

Miriam builds on this perfectly here. She discusses moving past the comfort of frameworks and “data truths” to embrace the uncomfortable. It’s about not stopping when you think you have the answer, but using AI as both a divergent and convergent partner to push your learning mindset further.

Check out Miriam’s talk that we referred to in the chat below - "Fear of Femininity. The Hidden Reasons Behind the Gender gap":

Also so I wasn’t throwing out random made up thoughts, some of the data points around women and men when it comes to AI usage:

• Deloitte – “Women and generative AI: The adoption gap” (TMT Predictions)

• Berkeley Haas – “AI’s Gender Gap”

• Deloitte / AIPRM generative AI statistics overview (includes gender split figures)

• Statistics Sweden – “One in four uses generative AI-tools”

• CNBC – “Gen AI is at risk of creating a new gender gap in job market”

As a Strategist working deep in the trenches of tech x AI, and as a father to five-year-old twins, I understand the fear. The online world can be hostile, intrusive, and addictive.

However, the debate currently feels stuck in a binary. For some reason, we find it hard to hold two truths from both sides of a discussion at the same time - which, in a lot of cases in this world, leads to more complex problems as opposed to solutions.

One side may argue that removing access altogether is the silver bullet. The other side argues that we don’t need bans if we just “educate kids properly.”

My take? You need both.

Banning access without education just delays the car crash until they turn 16. But education without safeguards is like teaching a kid to swim in a shark tank (the shark being a trillion $ megalodon).

We don’t teach road safety by banning roads forever. But we also don’t teach it by blindfolding kids until they turn 16 and then pushing them into rush hour traffic. We have speed limits (regulation) and driving lessons (education).

There are already great initiatives trying to bridge this gap. EE PhoneSmart, for example - a project from a past client of mine - is designed specifically to educate kids and parents before that first phone is handed over. It treats the phone like a vehicle that requires a license to operate. That is the kind of thinking we need more of.

I recently engaged in a debate regarding this “coddling vs. exposure” dilemma. My argument is simple: We need strict guardrails on a societal level, but within our homes, we must change how we expose children to tech.

We need to stop treating technology as a single monolith and start treating it as a history lesson.

The “Vodka Shot” Theory

If you haven’t read Jonathan Haidt’s work - whether it’s his book The Anxious Generation or even just following his Instagram account - it is worth the deep dive.

The data is increasingly clear, and Haidt’s work highlights a stark reality: There is currently no research that supports giving an under 16-year-old a smartphone with unrestricted access to social media apps.

When we hand a child a device loaded with TikTok or infinite-scroll gaming, we aren’t giving them a tool; we are giving them a dopamine pump. It is passive consumption at its most aggressive.

I wouldn’t worry about letting my children have a sip of wine at the dinner table when they are older. But I wouldn’t line up vodka shots for them as their first experience with alcohol.

Short-form, algorithmic social media is the digital equivalent of those vodka shots. It hits too hard, too fast, and without any appreciation for the craft or the consequences.

This is why we need the “Both” approach. We need the regulation (the ban) to stop the vodka shots being served to children. But we need the education to teach them how to appreciate the wine.

Screens Are Not the Enemy (The Zombie Factor)

I want to be clear: This is in no way a lecture to parents on being “screen-free.”

In fact, I am sure my kids watch more TV than many of their peers. I am not hiding screens from them. But we need to distinguish between Storytelling and Zombification.

When my kids watch an hour-long pantomime on CBeebies, or watch Lillefinger on Minisjang (the Danish public broadcaster), the experience is active. You can see them engaging with the plot, singing the songs, and appreciating the strangeness and the craft of the production.

Compare that to the mindless, algorithmic churn of YouTube Kids - channels like Kids Diana Show (nothing against them personally it’s just their type of content is mindless). There is no craft. There is no story. It is just colour, noise, and editing that triggers a trance state.

Jonathan Haidt breaks this down perfectly in one of his Instagram posts. He argues we must distinguish between:

1. Good Screen Time: “Story Time”

• What it is: Watching movies or long-form stories (30+ minutes) on a TV.

• Why it’s good: Humans are natural storytellers. Long-form narratives teach morality, present ethical dilemmas, and offer “powerful vicarious learning.” It is usually done socially (with family) and requires sustained attention.

2. Bad Screen Time: “Fragmenting Time”

• What it is: Using a personal device to scroll through short content.

• Why it’s bad: It lacks narrative. It encourages a constant search for the “most interesting thing,” training the brain to expect a new dopamine hit every 15 seconds.

The Long-Term Consequence: Haidt warns that if children spend hours a day on “fragmenting time,” they are training their brains to maximise interest at every second. This makes normal, slower-paced activities - like sitting in a classroom or having a conversation - feel “extremely painful” because they aren’t hyper-stimulating.

My “Time Machine” is designed to teach them to love the Story, so they don’t get addicted to the Fragment.

The Curiosity Crisis (Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up)

In my day job, I am obsessed with Mitch Resnick’s “Lifelong Kindergarten” approach from the MIT Media Lab.

I spend a lot of time working top-down with adults, clients and partners - trying to re-ignite curiosity. To unlearn the rigid structures they are used to and use AI in a playful, unstructured, explorative way.

But with our kids, we have a chance to work bottom-up.

In this week’s podcast, Jude Pullen spoke about the concept of “Incurable Curiosity.” That is the goal.

My fear is that if we give kids access to passive, short-term dopamine hits too early, we are curing their curiosity before it even has a chance to set. If the algorithm gives you what you want before you’ve even asked a question, the curiosity muscle atrophies.

We need technology to be an enabler of curiosity, not a blocker. We want them to ask “How does this work?” not just “What is next?”

The Rabbit Hole Approach: Clay to Code

This is why I loved speaking with Jude Pullen on The Rabbit Hole Experience. Jude sits at the intersection of high-tech engineering (working with NVIDIA) and tactile reality.

We discussed his concept of “Clay to Code.”

Jude’s project takes school children down to a riverbank to dig up raw clay. They cleaned it, fired it, and glazed it. They learned the provenance of the material. They learned that things come from somewhere.

If we want our children to survive the AI era, they need to understand that the shiny interactive screen is just a tool, that evolved from other tools, like clay.

Imagination doesn’t perform best in a frictionless vacuum environment with a single tool… There won’t be ‘A Technique for Producing Ideas’ Volume 2 that says - don’t allow your mind to wonder, don’t explore other environments with other tools, constantly keep high on dopamine with zero space between thoughts and feelings.

My Plan: The Rabbit Hole Time Machine Curriculum

My plan isn’t to be a Luddite. It’s to be a historian. I want my kids to have an active Point of View on technology.

However, my kids are five years old. They aren’t ready for the PS2 or the VHS storytelling yet. They are currently in Step 0.

Recent stats from a Sky News report this week (Jan 2026) were alarming: Nearly a third of children starting school try to swipe or tap physical books like a smartphone.

If a child tries to “swipe” a book, they have learned the interface of a machine (the code) before they have learned the interface of the physical world (the clay).

So, here are some first thoughts on some steps to help kids form an active POV around tech:

0. The Era of Reality (Paper, Mud & Boredom) Current Status: Active (Ages 0-6) Before they touch a screen too much that responds to every movement (I appreciate zero touch screen experience would be almost impossible :), they must master materials that ignore them.

• The Rule: Minimal tablets. Minimal smartphones. (As much as we can in order to prevent this way of interacting with media being the normal basic expectation)

• The Alternative: Pens, paper, screenfree-toys, mud, and physical books.

• The Lesson: Physics.

• If you swipe a book, nothing happens. You have to turn the page.

• If you press a piece of paper, it doesn’t light up. You have to draw on it.

• We are establishing the “Base Reality.” As Jude Pullen said: “Clay to Code.” You cannot understand the Code if you haven’t held the Clay.

1. The Era of Friction & Feeling (Vinyl, Cassette, VHS) We will play the same song on Spotify, then on a CD, then on Vinyl.

• The Experiment: We will listen to the “warmth” of the vinyl crackle. That over played track/ movie, we will watch a VHS and see how and why the picture “glitches”.

• The Lesson: Imperfection is human. Digital is perfect and replicable, but analog ages with you. A scratch on a record is a memory; a corrupted file is just an error. We learn that “newer” isn’t always “better” - sometimes it just lacks soul.

2. The Era of Ownership (DVD & Blu-ray vs. Streaming) We will watch a movie on Netflix, and then watch the same movie on 4K Blu-ray.

• The Experiment: I will explain that even “4K” streaming is compressed - it’s like trying to fit a swimming pool through a garden hose. The disc is heavy. It holds more data (has great bonus material / Easter Eggs). It is the “Reference Print”.

• The Lesson: Control. When you stream, you don’t own the film, and you aren’t seeing the true quality. The platform controls the delivery. Physical media teaches them that quality often requires physical space.

3. The Era of “The Complete Game” (PS2, Wii Vs Online Gaming) My kids won’t be in online lobbies. We are going to cover the full history of Sonic and Mario and beyond thanks to PS2, Wii and 8bitdo (there are many ways to do this, this method just aligned with my favourite hardware - I am very much a 90s, early 2000s Sony guy).

• The Experiment: We will compare these to a modern “Free-to-Play” game. On the PS2, the whole game is on the disc. There is no store. You cannot buy a “skin.” You unlock things by playing, not by paying.

• The Lesson: Incentives. I want them to ask: “Why is this modern game asking for money?”

• PS2 Era: The business made money when you bought the game. They wanted you to have fun so you’d buy the next one.

• Modern Era: The business makes money when you stay addicted and buy extras.

4. The Era of Utility (Nokia 3310 & Sony Ericsson) Before they touch an Android or Apple operating system, they will use a “Brick.”

• The Experiment: They will send a text using T9 predictive text on physical buttons. They will play Snake. They will experience 3G speeds (or whatever the oldest service is I can get them on when the time comes:).

• The Lesson: Intent.

• Buttons vs. Touch: Physical buttons are for communication. Touch screens are for consumption.

• Snake vs. The App Store: Snake is a game you play for less than 20 minutes (with some exceptions). The App Store is a bottomless pit designed to never end.

• They need to feel where the features started. They need to understand that a phone was originally a tool to connect with a person, not a portal to connect with the entire world at once.

• P.S. I’m a big fan of everything HMD is doing in this space

5. The Era of Specificity (Sony Cyber-shot & MP3 Players) Before they get a device that does everything, they will use devices that do one thing.

• The Experiment: We will take photos on a Sony Cyber-shot (I loved those things). We will listen to music on an MP3 player (and a Sony MiniDisc Player).

• The Lesson: Frictionless isn’t always better.

• When you use a Cyber-shot, you have to decide to take it with you. You are making a choice to be a photographer for the afternoon.

• When you have a smartphone, the camera is always there, leading to the mindless snapping of everything.

• They need to feel the difference between a “Tool” (a dedicated device) and a “Swiss Army Knife” (a phone designed to never leave your hand).

6. The “Black Box” Era (The Cost of Free) Once they understand the history, we look at where we are now: Social Media. And we ask the big question: “Is it Free?”

We will look at the timeline of the Value Exchange:

• Vinyl/DVD/PS2: You pay money -> You get a physical object, art, and ownership. (A clear trade).

• Streaming: You pay a subscription -> You get temporary access. (A rental trade).

• Social Media: You pay nothing -> You get infinite entertainment.

The Lesson: If the product is ‘free’, what are you paying with? Because they have played Mario and Sonic and held a vinyl/ DVD, they will understand that nothing is made for free.

• What does the app get? Your data. Your time. Your anxiety.

• What do you get? A distraction.

By knowing where we came from, they can see the trap in where we are.

Rabbit Hole Time Machine: "The future is whatever you make it." - Doc Brown

I am realising that if we want the next generation to handle the AI era - to handle the constant tech Rabbit Hole that needs to be explored with incurable curiosity - we can’t just throw them in the deep end as passive defenceless bait.

We risk producing young adults who are digitally naïve - vulnerable to manipulation in spaces they were never taught to navigate.

So, I’m putting this out to the burrow: parents, educators, and the curious.

I am working on formalising this approach - specifically the entry levels - curating the games, the hardware timeline, and the storytelling needed to explain tech to kids in an engaging way.

I’m calling it the Rabbit Hole←Time Machine.

If you are interested in this initiative, or if you just want to know how to set up a “Friction Tech” environment for your own kids, I want to hear from you. Email me directly: raibbithole@gmail.com

Let’s figure out how to build better pilots, not just better passengers that help boost YoY engagement metrics.

Listen to the full conversation with Jude Pullen on The Rabbit Hole Experience Podcast, Season 2, Episode 2.

We kick off the conversation discussing LEGO and Mitch Resnick, setting the table for a deep dive into three main areas:

☝ The Computer in a Brick: We unpack the tension between digital play and physical play. How do we balance the “computer in a brick” with the simplicity of playing with sticks, and how can opposing views on technology both be right at the same time?

🤘 Incurable Curiosity: Jude explains why the key differentiator for the future isn’t just creativity, but being “incurably curious.” We discuss the power of adaptability and the willingness to sit in the uncomfortable space of uncertainty to solve complex problems.

🤟 The Clay and The Code: We bridge the gap between two worlds. From high-performance computing to hand-dug ceramics, we explore why we don’t have to choose between high-tech and high-touch - and why true innovation needs both.

🕳️

Want to follow Jude deeper into his Rabbit Hole? - he has shared some links below 😊🐇🦨:

• https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/the-fight-to-repair-prologue

• https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/user/Hey%20Jude

• https://www.instructables.com/member/Hey%20Jude/instructables/

• https://www.judepullen.com/

It has been exactly one year since we last spoke, and the tone of the conversation has shifted dramatically. We are no longer debating whether AI can prove value. Instead, we are showing the multiple ways it already has, while exploring the nuance of how it scales. Crucially, we discuss why a “copy and paste” approach to implementation is doomed to fail - it requires a distinct cultural shift, not just a software update.

In this episode, we revisit themes from last year and explore the reality of the landscape in January 2026:

☝ The “Dishwasher Analogy”: Inspired by Rory Sutherland’s theory that the only way to find out what is dishwasher proof is to put everything in and see what survives. We discuss applying this “stress test” to AI in business - throwing it into workflows to see what dies and what comes out gold-plated.

🤘 Escaping Pilot Purgatory: How to move from endless testing to creating a flywheel of practical application.

🤟 Sentience & Culture: Why technology is no longer the blocker - human self-awareness and organisational culture are.

70% of the next generation of Operating Systems is likely exactly what the tech bros are working on: “efficiency gains.” And that’s fine. We need to book meetings, sort data, and process logistics.

But it’s the other 30% that is more interesting to me. That represents the gap between a machine that works and a mind that wanders. That is the space for Imagination Gains.

WHY NOW? The PS2 vs. The Utility

The recent OpenAI demos are staggering. They are hyper-efficient. They are frictionless. But when we want our OS to work for creative tasks, “frictionless” is actually a bug, not a feature.

I don’t want my creative interface to feel like a utility bill. I want it to feel like a game. For me, the peak of gaming was the PS2 era. It wasn’t about micro-optimizing engagement loops or extracting cash; it was about immersion. It was about play.

Right now, the industry is over-optimizing for speed. They are trying to remove human thought from the equation to get to the answer faster. I want to fill that 30% gap with an OS that helps us play with ideas, not just execute them.

The Screen Time Fallacy (A Lesson from my Twins)

I have twin 5-year-old girls. Like every parent, I wrestle with the concept of “Screen Time.” But I don’t see screens as the enemy.

Here is the heart of what raibbitholeNOS is trying to solve, distilled through a lesson from Jonathan Haidt:

Screen time itself isn’t the enemy. The type of screen time is.

There are two types of digital interaction:

1. Story Time (The Good) Long-form, shared stories - like watching a movie together.

• It creates connection: We sit together, react together, talk about it.

• It teaches structure: It has a narrative arc, moral frameworks (good vs. bad), and requires patience.

• It is constructive: It taps into how humans naturally learn.

2. Fragmenting Time (The Bad) Short, fragmented, solo screen use - doom-scrolling or rapid-fire prompting.

• It isolates: Phones used alone.

• It trains impatience: The brain constantly asks, “Is this the most interesting thing available right now?”

• It creates passive passengers: There is no narrative, only noise.

Building on the Spiral

In Part 1, I introduced the main inspiration for this entire project: Mitchel Resnick’s “Kindergarten Approach” and the Creative Learning Spiral (Imagine → Create → Play → Share → Reflect).

That shift - from passively receiving instruction to actively constructing ideas - is the theoretical code running this machine. It is the engine.

But an engine needs a chassis. It needs a way to interact with the human driver that inspires them rather than just instructs them. We are taking that theoretical loop and wrapping it in an experience that feels like “Story Time” mixed with “PS2 energy.”

THE HOW: Adding Strategic Friction

So, how do we actually build this? How do we code “Play” on top of Resnick’s loop?

1. Narrative, Not Noise Most AI tools today are “Chat” - a fragmented, endless scroll of questions and answers. raibbitholeNOS is built on “Canvas.” It forces a narrative structure. You don’t just “get an answer”; you build a workspace where ideas have a beginning, a middle, and an evolution.

2. Shared, Not Solo Just like “Story Time” is valuable because it is shared, raibbitholeNOS is multiplayer by default. It moves AI interaction from a private confession booth to a shared playground. It encourages the team to gather around the screen, rather than staring into their own private feeds.

3. The “PS2” Factor (Gamified Friction) We are intentionally adding friction to the spiral. We don’t want the AI to do the thinking for you. We want it to challenge you.

• Instead of “Here is the strategy,” the OS asks, “What if we inverted that assumption?”

• It gamifies the Creative Learning Spiral. It won’t let you skip to “Execute” until you’ve spent time in “Imagine.”

The Choice

The future of software is splitting. You can choose the OS that optimizes you out of the loop - the one that treats you like a bottleneck to be removed. Or you can choose the OS that treats you like a player to be empowered.

We don’t just automate the work. We unleash the play.

Email raibbithole@gmail.com to receive alpha updates on raibbitholeNOS and access our Roadmap / Alpha Test Groups, also subscribe to raibbithole.com for general news.

While you wait you can get some more info by clicking the deck below:

Subscribe now

Escaping the Productivity Trap

We stand at a critical juncture. As AI masters the predictable - automating up to 70% of routine tasks - the tech world is racing toward a “Productivity Trap.” The industry is currently obsessed with using AI to do the same things we’ve always done, just faster.

But efficiency gains have a ceiling. Imagination Gains do not.

Enter: raibbitholeNOS

raibbitholeNOS (Next Operating System) is an in-development AI application designed to be the interface for the augmented future.

Think of it as Nitrous for your mind - speeding up your curiosity by forcing you to slow down.

While standard operating systems are designed to remove friction and smooth the path from A to B, NOS adds strategic friction back in. It interrupts the autopilot of “efficiency” to trigger deeper thinking and exploratory wandering.

The Science of Constructionism

The philosophy behind NOS is grounded in the strategic framework presented by Rabbit Strat Matt in 2025 and inspired by the research of Mitch Resnick (MIT Media Lab).

We are moving away from “Instructionalism” (telling AI what to do) toward “Constructionism” (building and thinking with AI).

NOS is built around the Creative Learning Spiral:

Imagine → Create → Play → Share → Reflect

By operationalising this loop, NOS prevents “analysis paralysis” and turns the rabbit hole into an incubator for innovation. We don’t use AI to bypass the work; we use it to automate the structure so you can focus on the craft, the connection, and the human spark.

Join the Playground

We are building a tool for those who believe the future belongs to the curious, not just the efficient. We are looking for test groups ready to spiral through ideas rather than just execute tasks.

We don’t just automate the work. We unleash the play.

Email raibbithole@gmail.com to receive alpha updates on raibbitholeNOS and access our Roadmap / Alpha Test Groups, also subscribe to raibbithole.com for general news.

While you wait you can get some more info by clicking the deck below and check out Part 2: Why build raibbitholeNOS?:

Subscribe now

Back in September, I published a piece on WARC titled “Marketing is a second-order chaos system: Why Big Tech’s illusion of control falls short.”

At the time, it was a reaction to Amazon launching their Creative Studio. But sitting here in December, staring down the barrel of 2026, the thesis feels less like a theory and more like a survival guide.

I argued that while Big Tech is trying to engineer marketing into a predictable science (like weather forecasting), human attention is actually a “second-order” chaotic system - like the stock market. It reacts to predictions. It shifts when you look at it too closely.

If you missed it earlier this year, or if you want to understand what we are actually up against in the next 12 months, give it a read.

Read the full WARC piece here: Marketing is a second-order chaos system

The “Tech Bro” Mirage: Meta’s Andromeda & The 2026 Roadmap

I’m revisiting this now because the industry roadmap for 2026 is terrifyingly sterile.

We are seeing the rise of Meta’s Andromeda (often misheard as “Andromedia”). This is the new AI infrastructure sitting beneath Advantage+ campaigns. If Amazon’s Creative Studio was the opening act in September, Andromeda is the headliner.

By late 2026, the vision is effectively “Zero Touch.” You upload a product and a budget, and the machine does the rest - generating the creative, the copy, the targeting, and the pacing. The promise is a closed loop of perfect efficiency.

But as I wrote in WARC: “Efficiency without surprise quickly collapses into invisibility.”

If we all hand the keys over to the same “God Model,” we get a commoditized wall of noise. I call this the “Pee in the Pool” effect. When you over-optimize for engagement using generative AI, you don’t get better marketing; you get “AI slop” that poisons the ecosystem for everyone swimming in it.

Why I’m Leaning into My Neurodiversity

For a long time in my career, I felt the pressure to mask my ADHD and dyslexia. I felt I needed to lean into “order” - spreadsheets, linear roadmaps, and predictable logic - to fit the corporate mold.

But looking at this 2026 roadmap, I’ve realized that the “Tech Bro” obsession with order is a trap. They are trying to turn a second-order system (humanity) into a first-order system (code).

I’m realising now that my neurodiversity is actually the asset. The ADHD brain thrives in second-order chaos. We connect dots that shouldn’t be connected. Dyslexia forces us to read the world laterally, looking for context and shapes rather than linear instructions.

If AI handles the “order,” we need to handle the chaos. We need to be the glitch in the system.

The Antidote: Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies

So, how do we operationalize chaos? I’ve been looking back at Brian Eno and his deck of cards, Oblique Strategies.

Eno created these to break the linear loops of studio production. They are pure “second-order” interventions. They don’t tell you what to do; they disrupt how you think.

• First-Order Thinking: “How do I fix this mix?”

• Oblique Strategy: “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.”

This is how we need to approach AI in 2026. Instead of asking “What is the answer?”, we need to ask “How can I perturb this system?” Eno understood that controlled randomness leads to creativity. We need to use AI to amplify our “errors” and idiosyncrasies, not smooth them out.

The “Collage of Humanity”: Fred again.. & Nardwuar

If you want to see what this looks like in culture, look at Fred again...

In his interview with Nardwuar (another agent of chaos who disrupts the “PR script”), Fred talks about the “Collage of Humanity.” He creates music by stepping out of the vacuum-sealed studio and recording the mess of the real world - voice notes, street noise, random interactions (and as we know Fred again.. (Fred Gibson) is a protégé of Brian Eno).

He tells a story about meeting an elderly couple in New Orleans, which ended with a stranger in a clown mask twerking on the husband in the street. You cannot prompt an AI to generate that scenario. That is the magic of the “Collage of Humanity.”

It’s the antithesis of the Andromeda vision. It’s messy, it’s unoptimized, and it feels alive.

The Power of Improv: Ian Hotko

Finally, look at Ian Hotko.

He’s the 16-year-old dancer from Slovenia who blew up on TikTok freestyling to Fred’s tracks. He wasn’t following a choreography (First Order). He was reacting to the music in real-time (Second Order).

Fred saw it, and the human resonance - not the algorithm - bridged the gap. He flew Ian to Vancouver last month (November) for the “..FEISTY” show. He didn’t give Ian a script; he played a track Ian had never heard and said go.

The result was a viral moment that felt genuine because it was improvised. It was a risk. It was chaos.

Closing Thoughts for 2026

The brands that thrive in 2026 won’t be the ones that achieve “Zero Touch” automation. They will be the ones that use the machine to handle the grunt work, while they focus on injecting the humanity, the improv, and the “Collage of Humanity” back into the work.

We need to keep the pee out of the pool. And the best way to do that is to embrace the chaos.

Deep Dive Links:

• The Original WARC Article: Marketing is a second-order chaos system

• The Inspiration: Nardwuar vs. Fred again.. Interview

• The Visual: what caught Fred’s eye & Fred again.. x Ian Hotko (..FEISTY)

Check out the Bionic Awards trailer below:

In the conversation, we go deeper into:

• The “Doom vs. Boom” Continuum: How to move from anxiety to action and stay employable.

• Why AI Has No Taste: The “genius toddler” analogy and why human curation is more valuable than ever.

• Silicon Valley vs. The Artist: The tension between rapid iteration and the need for “slow,” reflective creativity.

• The Global Community: How creators from Bogota to London are using these tools to build new careers.

Main link is www.bionicawards.com

Follow on Insta at #thebionicawards

This conversation sat in my edit folder for way longer than I wanted. The sound didn’t come out the way I’d hoped (I will be levelling up my podcast hardware very soon :), and I was genuinely disappointed at the time. But after revisiting it, cleaning it up as much as I could, and listening again the insights were simply too good not to share.

Jennifer’s POVs aged very well :)

In the conversation, we cover:

The Future CMO

• The role now spans brand, performance, tech, and infrastructure

AI as an Accelerant

• Nobody fully knows the end state - experimentation is the job

Human Value in an AI-First World

• AI raises the bar for humans, it doesn’t replace them

Efficiency vs. Differentiation

• AI will win at optimisation and efficiency. Differentiation and originality become more valuable, not less

What Breaks, What Survives

• Breakthrough creativity is what CMOs will still pay for

It’s a calm, honest, and quietly radical take on where real value now sits:
sharp thinking, intellectual courage, and human judgement - amplified by AI.

You can keep following Jennifer via her Substack below:

probably something.

Probably Something - explores how frontier technology shapes marketing, consumer-focused business strategy, and the opportunities ahead. We used to joke about how something was "probably nothing" until we realised it was something.

By Jennifer Roebuck

In the conversation we cover:

• George’s shift from corporate strategy to “robot midwifery”

• Letting go of control in creative work with AI

• The theory-action gap in LLMs and what it means for alignment

• Building agents that reflect human values

• Citizen science returning through better AI tools

• Consciousness, conflicting goals, and multi-agent systems

• The real OS-level battle beneath today’s AGI hype

Some awesome areas of exploration from George can be found below, things mentioned in the conversation as well as additional goodness:

• Newell, Shaw, Simon - The Process of Creative Thinking (1958)
  https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/papers/2008/P1320.pdf

• J.C.R. Licklider - Man–Computer Symbiosis (1960)
  http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

• Douglas Engelbart - Augmenting Human Intellect (1962)
  http://www.dougengelbart.org/pubs/papers/scanned/Doug_Engelbart-AugmentingHumanIntellect.pdf

• Herbert Simon & Allen Newell - Human Problem Solving: State of the Theory (1970)
  https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/18ce/82b07ac84aaf30b502c93076cec2accbfcaa.pdf

• Marvin Minsky - Why People Think Computers Can’t (1982)
  https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/ComputersCantThink.txt

• Mark Pesce - Final Amputation: Pathogenic Ontology in Cyberspace (1993)
  http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fa.html

• Bret Victor - Stop Drawing Dead Fish (2013)

• Kevin Slavin - Design as Participation (2016)
  https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/design-as-participation

• Joichi Ito - Extended Intelligence (2016)
  http://v2.pubpub.org/pub/extended-intelligence

• Joichi Ito - Resisting Reduction: A Manifesto (2017)
  https://pubpub.ito.com/pub/resisting-reduction

• Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt - Oblique Strategies (1975)
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

• Norbert Wiener - Cybernetics (1948)

• Norbert Wiener - Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

• W. Ross Ashby - Introduction to Cybernetics (1956)

• Herbert Simon & Allen Newell - Elements of a Theory of Human Problem Solving (1958)

• Marshall McLuhan - Understanding Media (1964)

• Herbert Simon - Sciences of the Artificial (1969)

• Seymour Papert - Mindstorms (1980)

• Robert Axelrod - The Evolution of Cooperation (1984)

• Valentino Braitenberg - Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology (1984)

• Frederick Brooks - The Design of Design (2010)

• Mitch Resnick - All I Really Need to Know About Creative Thinking I Learned in Kindergarten (2007)

• Ted Chiang - The Lifecycle of Software Objects

• Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano

• Yuri Lotman - Inside Thinking Worlds

• Mark Solms - The Hidden Spring

• Marvin Minsky - Society of Mind

• Lev Vygotsky - Works on play, socio-cultural development, ZPD

• Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What Is Intelligence?

Want to make your first steps into quantum? - Andreas has provided some links below :)

“Pretty pedagogical, and more focused on hands on programming than describing the hydrogen atom. Enjoy!”

Learn quantum programming — PennyLane

Learn Quantum Computing Online | Free Tutorials & Interactive Exercises | IQM Academy - Learn Quantum Computing

Great chat with Stef Hamerlinck covering brand as an operating system and the role of AI in brand building, using his mascot Marcel as an example. He differentiates between “AI slop” and thoughtful AI use, acknowledging ethical concerns while emphasizing AI’s potential for creativity and community. His advice to brands is to prioritise distinctiveness and explore AI tools internally for prototyping ideas.

Check out Stef’s Substack and AI bubble short film below 🫧🐶:

Let's talk branding

The AI Bubble Is Real (and That’s a Good Thing)

Read more

5 months ago · 4 likes · Stef Hamerlinck

This recording is something accessible for clients after the WPP Media Denmark AI Strategy Session, a hands on pragmatic and practical 2hr workshop that pieces together all the market leading WPP ingredients from WPP Open, Open Pro, Open Intelligence, Satalia acquisition, Google partnership, Stability AI investment etc etc… applies it to specific clients and leaves them with a roadmap to follow and user cases to explore immediately.

Dr Laura Weis discusses her journey from academia to her current role in driving human AI strategy at WPP. She emphasises the importance of integrating talent and technology strategies to create value, highlighting that value creation lies at the intersection of these areas. Laura also addresses the narrative surrounding AI, noting that while AI can enhance productivity, it is crucial to focus on the conditions and context in which AI is used to ensure positive outcomes.

Don’t blame the spoon 🥄

Also check out Laura’s M-shaped opinion piece over on WARC’s Future of strategy 2025

This recording is something accessible for clients after the WPP Media Denmark AI Strategy Session, a hands on pragmatic and practical 2hr workshop that pieces together all the market leading WPP ingredients from WPP Open, Open Pro, Open Intelligence, Satalia acquisition, Google partnership, Stability AI investment etc etc… applies it to specific clients and leaves them with a roadmap to follow and user cases to explore immediately.

Alison Ebers dives into some of the topics the workshop covers exploring how AI is transforming agency processes, creative methods and the importance of human-AI collaboration. As well as change management challenges, and the commercial shift from billing time to valuing outcomes.

Zip Zippity Do Da 🚤

In Part 1, I argued that marketing isn’t a first-order system that can be optimised into predictability. It’s a second-order chaos system - shaped by culture, irrationality, and surprise. Push optimisation too far and you don’t just reduce impact, you poison the pool for everyone (“pee in the pool”).

This issue is about how those same principles are applied to strategy as a discipline, and how I’ve experienced them over 15 years in Adland strategy.

From Silos to Sparks

I’ve never really believed in pure specialisms in marketing. Since 2010 I’ve worked across brand, content, data, customer experience, and media - not as silos, but as intersections.

The most valuable insights don’t sit neatly in one discipline. They appear at the edges - where analytical thinking collides with creative leaps, where brand meets media, where data collides with culture. That’s where strategy becomes alchemy.

AI as Sandbox, Not Shortcut

AI is now part of that mix. But I don’t see it as a shortcut. I see it as a sandbox: a space to stretch, remix, and test ideas. Done right, it doesn’t just deliver faster answers - it surfaces new territories to explore.

The danger, as with marketing in general, is mistaking efficiency for progress. When that happens, you just end up accelerating the same “pee in the pool” contaminated output.

Heavy Processes, Lean Principles

I’ve always respected the strategy process, but resisted the weight of it. Some strategy frameworks are brilliant; others collapse under their own complexity. One of the most influential books in my career was The Lean Brand. It brought startup principles into brand building at exactly the moment I needed reassurance about things I was feeling and seeing in the industry (back in 2014).

When I interviewed Jeremiah Gardner on my podcast (in 2025), he spoke about the “gold line” of AI strategy. Cave divers use a continuous line back to the surface; no matter how deep they explore, they can always find their way back. In strategy, that line is empathy and evidence - anchoring everything back to the customer. AI can accelerate exploration, but without that line, you get lost.

👉 Check out the full conversation here: Into the Rabbit Hole with Jeremiah Gardner.

Agentic Workflows Don’t Change the Fundamentals

Agent-based workflows won’t remove the need for strategy. If anything, they amplify the importance of it. Humans still need to sit at the centre, holding the gold line, mixing the ingredients.

Automation can scale answers. But only alchemy can create ideas that feel alive. There must be humans who can manage the agentic systems, build from them, leverage them to explore deeper questions and answers that are greater than the sum of their parts.

WPP Open

At WPP, we’ve been building WPP Open, a platform that allows us to design multi-modal, multi-step agents for clients. The tech is powerful, but here’s the critical point: you can’t just build for the maximum capabilities of the machine.

When creating an agent, you have to map the full workflow across agency and client. Where does human skill add irreplaceable value? Which tasks can responsibly be handed to the machine? And what impact does shifting those tasks have on collaboration, creativity, and outcomes?

Equally important is how you feed information into the machine. You can’t just drop a 40-page deck in randomly and expect useful results. Information needs to be simplified, structured (for example, into a clean CSV), and made readable as part of the agentic steps - and also manageable for the owner of the agent to update and tinker with over time. Only then can the agent perform in a way that raises the performance of the user.

I see this process as similar to the construction of a creative brief in the traditional strategy sense. You don’t just dump all the background research into a brief; you simplify it down to the most useful springboard for creative minds. Building agentic systems requires the same discipline: distilling complexity into usable architecture, while also understanding the broader remit of the environment around it.

It’s not about pushing every process to its automated extreme - building a Black Box. A black box system may deliver outputs, but it hides the logic and makes it impossible to adapt or improve. What we need is the opposite: Explainable AI. Explainable AI means the agent is transparent in how it works, so humans can understand, tinker, and refine it over time.

That’s the difference between building a Black Box and building a Renaissance System. The Renaissance approach scales learning, keeps the full picture in view, and ensures that human imagination is amplified rather than automated away. It means making AI explainable, so strategists and clients alike can keep building human value into the workflow.

Stephan Pretorius, WPP’s CTO says it best:

Look at What’s Optimal And What’s Not

This is where the opaque vs. transparent question comes in.

Some industries are built on opacity - where value exchanges weren’t always exactly clear in terms of what you were getting for your money. When AI makes those systems fully transparent, the impact can be brutal. Whole categories can collapse when hidden value, or the lack of it, is suddenly exposed.

Marketing is different. As I argued in Part 1, we’ve already leaned and optimised processes over and over again. Strip it back too far and the output simply becomes valueless. Marketing requires chaos - because it’s a level 2 system.

In first-order systems (like logistics or supply chains - check out WPP Satalia), AI is superior in every way. In second-order systems like marketing, chaos isn’t a bug; it’s the fuel. Marketing has always leaned into the newest tech, some would argue too much in many ways. That pressure to experiment, though, is what keeps it alive.

But here’s the risk: if we replace opaque systems with Black Box AI - tools that look transparent on the surface but hide their logic and processes, we don’t actually solve anything. We just reinvent the same problems of opacity with new-age tech. That doesn’t help clients, and it doesn’t create value.

Strategic Principles to Hold On To

The same principles from Part 1 apply when developing agentic workflows:

• Skip ahead, lose the lesson. Clients who jump straight to enterprise AI may gain speed, but they miss the muscle memory of learning where humans add value. Differentiation comes from the balance, not the bypass.

• Attention is chaos, not code. Marketing cannot be fully controlled. AI can optimise, but it cannot guarantee what will spark attention. Surprise and irrationality are not bugs - they are features.

• Perfectly efficient. Perfectly ignorable. When every brand runs on the same agent systems, efficiency turns into commoditisation. The last frontier is imagination: the human capacity to inject nuance, surprise, and resonance into a world of predictable machines.

Why Alchemy Matters More

The last frontier in strategy isn’t automation. It’s imagination - our ability to combine disciplines, tools, and insights into something that’s more than the sum of its parts.

In a world where every brand will soon have access to the same AI agents, the difference won’t be who automates fastest. It will be who mixes best.

Because strategy has never been about choosing between creativity and rigour, brand and performance, humans and machines, chaos and order. It has always been about making alchemy out of all of them.

🕳️

These are truly inspiring times, and the rabbit hole goes much deeper…

🐰
This article was written in collaboration with AI (GPT-5). As part of an ongoing experiment to co-create with AI and live the improvements in real-time.

As a strategist, I've always craved solving problems in novel, interesting, and impactful ways. Yet what I've discovered is how rarely true innovation occurs. Most businesses prefer addressing challenges through proven methods based on previously successful solutions (which I both appreciate and understand).

Professors, however, follow their hunches to uncover new knowledge. While we hopefully have more agency in hypothesis-testing than Morty Smith exploring the universe with Rick Sanchez, imagine the possibilities of venturing down rabbit holes with a Rick-like guide... testing hypotheses together and solving problems through fresh knowledge that fuels your imagination.

This approach takes your explorations to new depths and your creativity to unexplored destinations. This represents just one of many potential scenarios... Daniel Hulme has a T-800 skull in his office but his efforts such as Conscium WPP can give us all hope... I look forward to having a T-800 Terminator 2 Rick Sanchez in my pocket, not that Terminator 1 model.

Wubba Lubba Dub Dub, come with me if you want to imagine 🤖