AI makes execution cheap. Strategy isn't.

One of the biggest changes AI brought to my work is simple to describe.

Work that once required specialists, coordination and several rounds of production can now sometimes reach a usable first version in hours.

That changes the economics of digital work.

It also creates a new problem.

A business can now produce bad ideas much faster than before.

I have worked in digital marketing and e-commerce since around 2017, and I have been interested in technology for much longer than that.

Today, I use AI across marketing, operations, product work and decision-making.

The more I use it, the more I think its most important effect sits outside the technology itself.

It changes where the value in a business begins to move.

Execution used to be a bigger bottleneck

For years, a significant part of digital execution was limited by friction.

A new landing page required design and development.

Creative variations required production.

Research required manual collection and synthesis.

A prototype often needed technical skills a founder did not have.

You needed specialists, time, budget and coordination.

Each of those things slowed the distance between an idea and something you could actually test.

AI has lowered many of those barriers.

I want to be precise about what that means.

Expertise still matters.

A good designer, developer, analyst or copywriter can produce better work because they bring experience, judgement and context.

What has changed is the friction involved in getting to a first version.

That friction is falling quickly, and that changes how businesses can operate.

AI created abundance

A company can now produce more concepts, variations, drafts, tests and prototypes than it could a few years ago.

That sounds like pure upside.

In practice, abundance creates a selection problem.

When ten ideas become one hundred, the difficult question becomes which three deserve attention.

The value begins to shift from production capacity toward selection quality.

Producing more options creates an advantage only when someone can identify the few worth pursuing and discard the rest.

Faster execution can make bad decisions more expensive

If a team is moving in the wrong direction, AI can help it move faster.

It can help produce more irrelevant content, test weak offers, build features customers do not need or automate a process that was already broken.

All of that can look like productivity.

The output increases.

The underlying decision does not necessarily improve.

This is how I think about AI as leverage.

Leverage amplifies the decision behind it.

Speed becomes valuable when the direction is good enough.

The direction still requires judgement.

The first version is getting cheaper

The place where AI helps me most is the move from nothing to something.

A first draft.

A first prototype.

A first visual direction.

A first synthesis of research.

A first structure for a landing page.

Getting to that first version used to require more time and coordination.

For an entrepreneur, making the first version cheaper has real value because it makes learning cheaper too.

You can explore an idea before committing large amounts of time, money or people to it.

I value that enormously.

But a first version still needs to be evaluated.

It may still need better positioning, stronger differentiation, factual corrections, commercial thinking or simply better execution.

The faster you can produce Version 1, the more your results depend on how well you can judge Version 1.

Taste is becoming a business skill

I use the word taste in a practical sense.

It is the ability to recognise good work from generic work, clear from confusing, distinctive from derivative, credible from artificial and useful from unnecessary.

AI can produce a large amount of competent output.

The person deciding what to publish, ship or present still needs standards.

That applies to brand, creative, websites, products and communication.

When competent execution becomes more widely available, the ability to reject average work becomes more valuable.

I find myself spending less time producing first versions and more time reviewing, cutting, refining and asking whether the work says anything a competitor could not say just as easily.

Context stays with the business

AI can help process information and reason through options.

The context that makes a decision useful still comes from the business.

That context includes the company's economics, what customers say in conversations, internal constraints, operational reality, positioning history, risk tolerance, what has already failed and what matters right now.

The quality of a decision depends heavily on that context.

AI can help work through it faster.

But the people inside the company have to provide it.

That becomes increasingly important when many competitors have access to similar tools.

Strategy becomes more about prioritisation

For me, strategy means more than producing a long plan.

In an environment where AI is part of the work, strategy increasingly means choosing, sequencing, allocating resources and deciding what to leave out.

A company may now have the technical capacity to launch several campaigns, multiple products, dozens of pieces of content and new automations in a short period of time.

Having the capacity creates options.

It does not create more attention.

A team can build far more than it can manage, sell or maintain well.

Strategy is how you decide where that limited attention should go.

AI changes how I build

In my own work, AI helps me move faster from an idea to a first version.

It allows me to explore several directions before committing significant resources to one.

It helps me create initial drafts, challenge assumptions and accelerate parts of research and execution.

That matters in product work too.

Budget Buddy, which I founded, is a multi-currency expense-tracking product designed around the needs of Italians and expats managing spending across currencies.

Salon Voice, which I also founded, helps salons and beauty businesses collect customer reviews, with AI helping customers express their feedback more easily.

For me, one of the most useful things AI does for an entrepreneur is reduce the distance between an idea and a test.

When that distance shrinks, you can explore more ideas, reject weak directions earlier and commit more deeply to the ones that show real potential.

It also changes what I expect from people

AI changes some of the skills I value most in the people I work with.

I value people who can frame a problem, make decisions, communicate clearly, evaluate output critically, use tools effectively and connect their work to a business result.

Producing a first draft is becoming easier.

Knowing whether that draft solves the right problem matters more.

That distinction becomes more important as the tools improve.

The risk of sameness

When production becomes easier, a lot of work starts to look similar.

Websites, copy, brands, content and pitches can drift toward the same competent, forgettable middle when teams accept the first reasonable output.

AI makes competent execution more accessible.

That is useful.

The advantage comes from what you bring into the process: context, original inputs, strong editing, real experience and distinctive choices.

A company with something specific to say can use AI to express it faster and in more places.

Where the advantage is moving

When a tool becomes widely available, access to the tool itself creates less differentiation.

The advantage moves toward how the business uses it.

For me, that means judgement, customer understanding, proprietary context, distribution, trust, brand, standards, speed of learning and prioritisation.

None of those things are new.

AI simply makes their importance more visible.

I am excited about AI because it removes friction from building.

It gives businesses more capacity.

The people running those businesses still have to decide what that capacity is for.

The cheaper execution becomes, the more care I want to put into deciding what deserves to be executed.