Andrew Au, co-CEO of Intercept, asked me on his Chat B2B podcast what rule every creative leader needs to break in the AI era.
My answer: Stop optimizing for volume. Volume isn’t value anymore.
When I was leading content strategy for Creative Cloud for Enterprise at Adobe, my mandate was adoption, consumption, and renewal. Every piece of content across every channel had to connect back to one of those or it wasn’t developed. That kind of clarity is a forcing function and it’s a discipline I’ve carried across every role.
It doesn’t mean saying no to wildly creative ideas. It means figuring out how to make them work. When I was leading security messaging across brands at Dell Technologies, I put a CTO on stage to motivate a global sales force to have security conversations with customers. Every musical act I chose had four members, including K-pop artists, because our go-to-market messaging had four pillars. The four members made the framework memorable and visceral rather than just another slide. The international acts told a global sales force this message was built for their markets, not just ours. The creativity was doing real work.
Every decision has a reason behind it that goes beyond filling a calendar or hitting a publish target.
Many content programs don’t have that clarity. They have volume targets. Assets produced. Campaigns launched. Pages published. AI has pulled that logic apart. Volume doesn’t tell you anything useful anymore about whether the work mattered.
Andrew named it plainly. Revenue per head is a dominant metric right now. When AI makes everything faster, the risk is we all get to mediocrity. We all sound the same.
Revenue per head is a fine metric. The question is what behavior it triggers. If the answer is more volume, you’re optimizing for the wrong thing. That’s the trap. More of what wasn’t working, just faster.
The teams doing this well aren’t doing something new. They’re finally able to do what good strategists always wanted to do. AI gives you sharper audience insight, faster signal on what’s landing, and better analysis of what actually moved a buyer. The question is whether your program uses those capabilities to produce more, or to produce less of the right thing with more precision.
AI is the creative yes-man. It doesn’t know when enough is enough. But we do.
Stop measuring what you ship. Start measuring what you solve.
This post draws from a conversation on Chat B2B with Andrew Au. Full episode: YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify.
