The Great Compression
How AI is collapsing the time between insight and action
We had a nostalgic talk. We were chatting about what to write as an intro for this week’s edition. We ended up revisiting our first marketing projects, more than 20 years ago.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my first marketing job. The one where building a competitive analysis meant three days of manual research, two days of PowerPoint wrangling, and one long night before the presentation.
Last week, I watched that same process happen in under 10 minutes.
Torsten
I remember my first marketing proejct. I was reviewing thousands of news clippings to analyze industry sentiment across a few brands. It took a team of five over a month to pull together the final PR report — and weeks more to get it published.
Today? I alone can do it with the right AI tools in under an hour.
Peter
From Perplexity’s real-time dashboards to CEOs deploying digital avatars, the headlines this week aren’t just about AI automating tasks. They’re about collapsing entire workflows. The time from question to insight — and from idea to asset — is now measured in minutes, not weeks.
But here’s the part the “AI will replace you” crowd keeps missing:
This isn’t about replacement. It’s about amplification.
The marketers who are winning right now aren’t the ones with the deepest resumes. They’re the ones who know how to orchestrate — tools, agents, workflows — faster than anyone else.
When your competitor can spin up market research over coffee and deliver a pitch deck before lunch… being good isn’t enough anymore.
You need to be f—in’ fast.
