I’ve had an agency growing start-ups and scale-ups from zero to millions in fundraising and revenue for ten years, and I was a freelancer for the 15 before that. I’ve worked in and around start-ups for my entire career.

The scariest shift I’ve seen in the start-up landscape? The business in which everyone uses AI to do all the thinking and talking for them.

How can you tell if you’re in this kind of business right now? Easy. All the emails around you just keep getting longer and longer, with no end in sight, as one AI talks to another. What

“That’s a sharp observation, Tina. Here are 14 in-depth ways your email misses the mark.”

I increasingly believe there’s a right way and a wrong way to use AI. The right way is coding and automating mundane, non-human processes.

The wrong way is claiming that you wrote something that AI wrote for you. How many LinkedIn newsletters haven’t written a word in months? How many conferences have devolved into a series of AI-made presentations that all look the same?

A business today in which every employee is just one ChatGPT talking to another ChatGPT may feel productive, because all the conversations look so serious.

But GPT-speak is just papering over real problems much like a shiny new tattoo won’t cover up my beer gut. Sorry bud, you’re here to stay.

You can’t serious-speak your way to a successful company. You have to build something of real value.

And marketing a real business is about more than just shoving a bunch of semi-technical jargon onto an AI-made template. It’s about communicating an idea effectively and here’s what people tend to forget: communicating it simply.

Sadly, we’re all going to have to send our BS detectors into overdrive over the next several years, as more and more people around us get suckered into the dark side of AI.

I’m just glad I’m not a VC right now.