AI Field Notes – Issue No. 23

Is There an AI Bubble? Yes and No.

Everyone keeps asking whether AI is a bubble.

Here’s the truth:

Short-term?

Yes — because uneducated retail investors are throwing cash into anything labeled “AI.” Money is sloshing between big players like OpenAI, Oracle, Microsoft — and half the deals look like a round-robin shell game, not true value creation.

Long-term?

Absolutely not. People calling this a bubble are confusing ChatGPT usage with the entire AI industry.

AI is not “the app you use to write an email.”

AI is:

• robotics
• medical systems
• industrial automation
• logistics
• scientific discovery
• business infrastructure
• workflow redesign
• new products and new categories

LLMs are just one branch of a much larger transformation.

We’re not in a bubble — we’re in the first inning of the largest industrial shift since electricity.

Stop Comparing This to the Dot-Com Era

Yes, there are similarities:

• too many wrapper companies
• too many founders chasing hype
• too much capital chasing shallow value

But here’s the difference:

The internet gave us access. AI rewires the foundations of business.

The internet let you find things. AI makes decisions, eliminates bottlenecks, and restructures how companies operate.

Businesses build teams specifically to work around inefficiencies. AI destroys those inefficiencies at the root — permanently.

That is not a bubble. That is structural rewiring.

Madison Avenue Is Getting Emptied Out

Take every large agency with 200–300 people and understand this:

That same output will soon be done by 4–5 people who know how to build AI stacks.

Creative, art direction, strategy, digital, dev, media — AI compresses all of it.

Commexis right now, with the stack we’ve built, can compete with almost any agency in the country. Not because we’re “better,” but because we actually understand how to integrate AI into workflows.

Most agencies don’t. And they’re about to get hollowed out.

If You’re Majoring in Marketing, Stop.

I tell young people this all the time:

If you’re studying marketing in a traditional sense, you’re studying a field that’s disappearing.

The next-generation marketer must:

• think like a software engineer
• read data like a data scientist
• understand business processes
• know how to code or vibe-code
• understand product pricing
• understand workflows and operations
• understand customer psychology

Marketing is morphing into business engineering + customer insight + AI execution.

The creative-only marketer? Your career has an expiration date.

Become an AI Pilot or Get Left Behind

This is the new operating role inside every organization.

An AI Pilot is the person who:

• knows how AI works
• knows how a business works
• knows how to redesign workflows
• knows how to integrate automation
• knows how to QC outputs
• knows how to enhance human expertise with machine intelligence

AI doesn’t replace marketers.

AI replaces marketers who never learned to fly the plane.

The SEO Debate Is Proof Most Marketers Don’t Understand AI

The latest “Will AI replace SEO?” debate drives me insane.

Most marketers do not understand what AI does.

Search is search and retrieve. You type → you browse → you click → you decide.

AI is stateful problem solving. You ask → it solves → you’re done.

If AI gives you the answer, why would you click to a website?

SEO experts are still optimizing for a world where people visit websites for answers.

That world is dying.

This isn’t about rank.

This is about replacing the entire intent-to-answer pathway.

The marketers stuck in the old search model will disappear with it.