There's a story the AI industry has been telling for years: AI creates. It writes copy, generates video, designs ads. Give it a prompt and watch it produce.
OpenAI believed this more than anyone. Sam Altman called Sora a "ChatGPT for creativity" moment. Disney put $1 billion on the table. Six months later, Sora is dead after burning a million dollars a day. Disney found out less than an hour before the public. The tech worked fine. It just didn't connect to revenue, and when compute is finite, that's a death sentence.
Between stories like this and the state of the world — Middle East conflict, tariffs, 95% of companies reporting zero AI ROI — marketers appear frozen. Why invest in tools that might not exist next quarter?
But while OpenAI was losing billions on creation, Perplexity Computer launched on a different premise: curation. It doesn't have its own model. It orchestrates 19 of them, routing each task to the best available tool. It hit $450M ARR in a month.
Creation is expensive and fragile. Curation is flexible and durable. So if you're feeling frozen right now and want to build something, start here: take an existing workflow tied to revenue, add different AI tools at different stages, and measure what earns its keep. When tools inevitably rise and fall, you swap the part — not the machine.
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We're upgrading the ubiquitous user re-engagement workflow. We'll add three different AI tools at three different stages--each chosen for task fit, each fully swappable.
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If a tool disappears tomorrow, the workflow still runs without them. That's the point. |
The AI tools built around creation are failing. Sora is dead. Jasper has been through multiple layoffs and a valuation cut. Adobe tried to kill a 25-year-old creative tool in favor of AI and reversed course in 48 hours. The tools built around curation are surging. Perplexity orchestrates 19 models and hit $450M ARR in a month. Zapier connects AI agents to 8,000+ apps--with nearly 30% of its AI workflows focused on lead management. No AI wins everything. The market has decided.
› Test which AI tools actually improve conversion at each stage of your pipeline, with real, live data.
› Build workflows that still function without AI, but perform better with it.
› Develop institutional knowledge about which AI handles which job best, and remain AI-agnostic so you aren't tied to a single vendor.
› When a contact hits 90 days inactive, Zapier sends company name to Perplexity's Sonar API. It searches for recent signals — funding, hiring, leadership changes, product launches — and returns a cited summary and priority. Add these fields to your CRM.
› Feed Claude the contact's segment, original engagement history, and your current content library. Claude picks the single most relevant asset for that contact and writes a one-line reason why. That recommendation populates a HubSpot personalization token in your email template. The contact who downloaded your automation guide gets re-engaged with your latest automation case study — not your generic newsletter.
› When a contact re-engages — clicks, replies, books a call — a Zap fires and sends their full CRM history to a ChatGPT step. It synthesizes everything into a 3-sentence sales brief: who they are, what they cared about, and why they're back. That brief lands in Slack or a HubSpot task. Your rep walks into the conversation with context, not a cold CRM record.
Two outcomes. First, you wake up dormant revenue with smarter prioritization, better content matching, and faster handoffs. Second — and this is the real edge — you build a knowledge base of what AI actually does for your pipeline. Not what a vendor promised. Not what a case study claimed. What it did, in your workflow, with your data. That knowledge compounds. And it travels with you no matter what the AI market does next.
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Adobe announced it was discontinuing its 25-year-old Animate software to focus on AI. They couldn't name a single product that fully replaced it. The backlash wiped nearly $9 billion in market cap. Adobe reversed course within 48 hours. Learn More...
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