Volume 113: How Not to Be Replaced by an Algorithm

Apologies for the late delivery and shortened format this week. I was down in Austin talking at the Brand New Conference, which made me a little distracted on the writing front.

Anti-Ultraboring. How Not to Be Replaced by an Algorithm.

Hey. For anyone who wasn’t there, I spent the past few days in Austin with the exceedingly lovely Bryony Gomez-Palacio, Armin Vit, 1,000 attendees, and fellow speakers at the Brand New Conference 2022, a design conference focused on branding, where I had the distinct pressure of being the only non-designer on stage.

Rather than re-hash past work, I decided to focus on the thing that strategy exclusively deals with—the future. Specifically, what a future might look like upon the advent of AI-enabled design tools.

I’m not sure if the webcast was recorded for future posterity. I’ll reach out and see if there’s a way to share. Until then, here are the slides and the very detailed speaker notes I wrote for myself. I went off-piste a few times, but the content is pretty close. Imagine the slides on a 30-foot by 20-foot screen. Think of it as Off Kilter if it were live and on stage.

What isn’t in the article is that my Apple Watch buzzed violently and lit up with bright red alarms just minutes before going on stage. My heart rate was elevated…I already knew that Apple. You’re not helping.

And, for anyone doing public speaking. While it’s more common to make simpler notes to remind yourself of what to say on stage, if you’re feeling incredibly nervous like I was, writing everything out in full is a great way to help internalize it for later. Had I the time, I’d have shortened the notes afterward, but since I finished writing these about 2hrs before go-time, I couldn’t do that. The good news is that because I didn’t have time to edit, you’re way more likely to follow what I was trying to say now.