Every marketing leader I talk to right now has the same anxiety: AI's moving too fast for me to keep up. They're getting infinite questions from their team - "what's coming next, what it means for the team and their marketing strategy".

The reality is, no one truly understands how this plays out. I spend way too much time with AI, and I have thoughts, but nothing concrete. Anyone who tells you exactly how the future will play out is hypothesizing at best.

Instead, I find this story is relevant to what they are going through:

In 1979, Bill Walsh took over the worst team in the NFL. The 49ers were 2-14. His first move was to tell the entire team to stop focusing on winning. Instead, he created a "Standard of Performance", an obsessive focus on the inputs he could control. How they practised. How they prepared. How they showed up for each other. Every detail, everyday.

It led to 3 Super Bowls. Here’s the interesting thing, only 5% of marketing leaders are seeing significant gains from AI right now (Gartner, 2025). That's 5%! We're all still at the 2-14 stage. Most teams have a losing record. Which means there's still time to build your standard of performance before the game is decided.

We all want to win. I freaking love winning.

How we win is going to change rapidly, and spending all your time predicting AI's next move, or having the entire team get sidetracked by the latest AI influencers' declaration of what's dead, what's insane, and why everything is different now, is a losing formula.

What you can control is how fast your team learn new tools and integrates them into your workflows. You can control having real taste makers on your team, as the only moat against AI saturation is to create things your consumers choose to consume. You can control who you hire, domain experts, curious, technical, who can help to create world-class customer experiences.

You start by deciding which inputs matter, then focus on what you can control. Everything else is noise. It's hard, but this is the core job of today's leaders.

You do those things, winning will take care of itself.