Have you done any consulting with e-commerce brands, and are there any common AI-driven easy wins for content or operations?
Yes, I've done lots of consulting with e-commerce brands. A common AI-driven easy win is generating virtually infinite ad creative—using video models, you can feed your product and have it do anything, like a giant bottle falling from the sky crushing buildings. It's entirely up to your imagination. I value ad creative because removing that bottleneck unlocks reach, which is a core pillar of growth. While some organic-only brands are impressive, creating high-quality content, copy, and creative remains a bottleneck that limits reach.
I'd automate anything that drives growth—for e-commerce that means getting total eyeballs on your brand. I also automate other things, like a campaign that scanned Reddit posts in 30‑40 relevant subreddits, compiled the last 24 hours of posts, and had humans post soft‑sell snippets recommending the product. Those are genuine, human‑sounding comments (not the obvious AI slop like “Everything was lost until I read XYZ book”), and they work well because they’re just more eyeballs on the brand.
The key is tasteful use of AI, not just having AI‑generated ads. Everyone can now produce AI advertisements, but differentiation comes from how you apply them. If you’re a strong cold‑email copywriter, you can become an excellent AI ad generator because the skills overlap. Focus on the creative strategy behind the AI output, ensuring the ads feel authentic and aligned with your brand, rather than relying on generic AI templates.
I think marketing agencies are great; I niche down with them and make more money than most with an equivalent service. Whether you need to differentiate depends on your goals—if you aim to be the Uber of automation agencies selling to marketing agencies at $100M/year, you'll need more differentiation than just 'marketing agency'; if you want a tiny niche, you can target whatever you want, especially if you have experience to stand out. As for assets to send to marketing or creative agencies that aren't just AI‑generated: you can build them whole HTML websites (customized with context) and host them; generate newsletters from templates; create PPC ad creatives based on trending ad‑library content; produce high‑quality proposal templates; make slide decks; essentially any day‑to‑day marketing agency deliverable can be generated with AI, but the biggest impact is the customized HTML template because clients are impressed by receiving a full website.
The biggest lesson I learned is that the actual product or service you sell doesn’t matter much—AI automation is just a fulfillment mechanism. What really counts are the core business systems you build around it: lead handling, sales scripts, onboarding, admin, hiring, marketing, taxes, etc. Those pieces stay the same across industries; only the specific service you deliver changes. Once you have a solid business foundation, you can swap in any offering and still succeed. I’ve seen the same principles work when I sold videography, local SEO services, courses, and even events—so it’s less an ‘AI journey’ and more a general business journey.