Over the last three years, I have been working with companies on their AI strategy. The challenges started with, ‘what is AI and what does it mean to me?’ Then, ‘where do I start?’. How do I upskill my team and with which AI tool? What is a hallucination and why does it happen? Why are my employees putting company and consumer data into ChatGPT? Why is my compliance team yelling at me? Why aren’t we getting real value out of AI? And finally, and perhaps most tragically, ‘why can’t AI do my laundry?

Fair questions one and all!

As AI has evolved (and sometimes devolved), some of us are more confused than ever. Google’s Nano Banana took generative image generation to the next level. Three weeks ago, it finally worked out what to do with logos. (Undesired logo manipulation by AI was always puzzling to me.)

Whereas once upon a time ChatGPT couldn’t even look at the Internet or find information less than 2-years old, now we have Deep Research from all the AI labs that can go deep on research in accordance with our boundaries.

Yet, despite all the signal and the noise, McKinsey & Company reveals that only 30% of organizations are actually seeing measurable AI wins. Even worse? The club of true high achievers is just 6%.

What’s the difference between the 30% and the 6%? The high performers aren't just sprinkling AI on top of their old, Lotus Notes-like processes like glitter on a landfill. They are fundamentally redesigning their workflows.

The centerpiece of this redesign? The Rapid Iteration Loop.

Forget the 'Big Reveal' culture where a project goes on a six-week bender and does the walk of shame into the boardroom with nothing but a headache and a regretful 40-slide deck. The loop is about small wins, fast data, and failing so quickly that it actually feels like winning.

Here’s how the Rapid Iteration Loop looks when we drag it out of the POC and plug it into the rest of the business, starting with Marketing.

This is Part 1 of a 5-Part Series on how success in AI is determined by the Rapid Iteration Loop use cases in Marketing, Supply Chain, Finance, Sales, and HR & Culture.

Marketing: From the "Super Bowl Ad" Ego to the "Content Casino"

Traditional marketers are often obsessed with the "Big Bang", that one expensive, over-produced campaign that is supposed to fix everything. It’s like putting your entire life savings on a single spin of the roulette wheel and then being shocked when the ball lands on "Total Irrelevance."

The Old Way: The "Hero Asset." This is peak cheugy. (For you old people out there, this is GenZ for when a brand tries too hard to be cool - you know the type!). You’re trying way too hard to have "Main Character" energy with a big-budget commercial, but you end up looking like a Girl Dad trying to use the word "rizz" at a BBQ. While you were saying, What’s on Tap, your customers moved on to other things.

The Rapid Iteration Loop: Marketing becomes a data-driven Content Casino where the house (that’s you) always wins because you’re playing every table at once.

• The Input: AI flags a trending TikTok related to your product or product category.
• The Loop: Instead of a six-week production cycle, your "War Room" generates twelve low-fidelity versions of a response by 10:00 AM.
• The Output: You push all twelve ideas to a small "lookalike" audience. By 2:00 PM, the AI tells you which one is doing the best. By 4:00 PM, that winning angle is already being turned into your main ad for the week.

You aren’t just "marketing"; you’re gaming the algorithm in real-time. It’s the difference between being a "brand" and being a Main Character whom people actually want to follow.

In Closing

The solution isn’t automating and putting an AI layer on your existing processes and data, It’s a mindset shift.

The McKinsey 6% high performers look different because they stopped treating their work like a museum exhibit and more like a competitive sport with the game tied and there's 5-minutes to go. They treat it like a living organism.

1. Input the right data (your 3 most successful social campaigns).
2. Shorten your loops (months become hours).
3. Let AI handle the variants (the boring stuff).
4. Let humans handle the judgment (the brilliant stuff).

Don't wait for the annual review. Start the engine, rev the loop, and leave the "old way" in the dust.

2026 AI Kickoff Program

We designed the 2026 AI Kickoff Suite to bridge the gap between the 30% of value creating organizations to the top 6% high achievers. We know you are busy, so we designed this to be low-friction. You don't need to have AI experience or be technical - We handle the heavy lifting. We provide:

• Deploy an employee AI readiness survey that takes 10 minutes to complete
• Interview five stakeholders
• Analyze the data
• Map that data to the best practices of the nearly 20 AI Transformation Roadmaps we have co-created in the last year
• We create your customized AI roadmap containing 5-6 recommendations to move the needle in 2026.

Are you open to a short conversation to discuss moving your team from "usage" to "real value"? DM me or See the link in the first of hundreds of comments ;-)

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