Mind Soup

Over the years, as an official Meta trainer and through programs for Google, the British Council, the United Nations, the European Union, JCI, universities, and many others, I've trained more than 25,000 people in marketing and digital skills. That's a lot of rooms, a lot of workshops, a lot of watching the moment when something clicks for someone and the more common moment when it doesn't. Along the way I've formed some strong opinions about how marketers actually learn, as opposed to how we usually try to teach them. Most of what I believed at the start turned out to be wrong. Information is not the bottleneck When I started, I assumed my job was to transfer information. The learner didn't know how paid social worked; I knew; I would explain it clearly; now they'd know. Teaching as download. This is almost entirely wrong, and the internet proves it. Every technical fact I could teach in a workshop is available for free online, in more detail, at any hour. I...

Every marketing team I speak to now uses AI in some form. Someone is drafting captions in ChatGPT, someone else is generating images, a third person is quietly pasting the quarterly numbers into a chatbot and asking it what to make of them. What almost none of these teams have is fluency. They have usage, which is a very different thing, and the gap between the two is where most of the value is either won or lost. I spent the past month deliberately closing that gap for myself and my team, working through Anthropic Academy's courses and then rolling the thinking out across how we actually work. What follows is what I've come to believe fluency means, why usage alone is a trap, and how a marketing leader can build the real thing. Usage is not fluency Here is the uncomfortable truth about how most marketers adopted AI: they treated it like a faster search engine or a junior copywriter who never sleeps. You ask, it answers, you paste the answer somewhere. That works for the ...