How can you not talk about weather like this?

The latest in my second, sporadic season of Weeknotes:

• I got scolded for talking about the weather during the insanely sunny 10 days we had. But I was in Scottish mountains for three of them and it was amazing. I make no apologies.
• I'm updating a talk I wrote last year on the future of marketing. I'm on my own now so I've been asking people with interesting viewpoints to chat to me about it. I've had three really interesting conversations with Patrick Fagan (a data psychologist), Nick Sherrard (all round smart dude and MD of Label Sessions), and Faris Yakob (another all round smart person and co-founder of Genius Steals). This has been excellent for kicking ideas around. I recorded the conversations with a view to putting out a podcast for those that want to dive deeper after the talk. More interesting chats are in the pipeline!
• To elaborate, I'm exploring the future of decision making and how AI might change that. If it does, then marketing might have to change too. Otherwise, AI is just another channel.
• Of course there are a bunch of other things that might affect the future of marketing besides AI. But AI does feel like it's the new technology platform (following internet, then mobile) that will change how marketing works.
• I'm wrapping up my work on the adult social care accelerator next week. Ending phases well is always interesting. This work involves a huge number of external stakeholders, so I've been doing a lot more comms planning than on previous projects I've done.
• Part of this is a lovely documentary style film about the work we've been doing. I can't wait to share this. It's been a long held ambition to create this type of film on a project and the team at Possible Studios have absolutely nailed it.
• That also means I'll be available for projects from early May!
• I've been using OpenAI's Deep Research for a bunch of different things and it is excellent.
• Apparently Ernest Hemmingway used to practice his empathy and creativity by wandering to a cafe, sitting down, watching people and trying to describe honestly (by writing, c'mon it's Hemmingway) what was going on. I think this is such a lovely exercise and, honestly, I'm really craving this. I'm booking some impromptu ethnography time in soon.

Stuff I consumed this week

Opinion Actually, A.I. Is Pretty Mid - The New York Times

Argument that AI won’t be transformative in its own merit. It saves some people some time. Deeper revolution requires experts who can understand what the AI is helping them with, but we’re hamstringing ourselves by attacking the institutions that create experts. I think this would have benefited from distinguishing between machine learning and generative AI. Nicely written though. I think that any argument that says it’s not going to transform work meaningfully is essentially an argument that most work is not meaningful. But also that most tech co’s aim the tech at use cases which aren’t meaningful because they’re easy.