Most conversations about AI in marketing start with fear. Will it replace me? What happens to my team? How do I stay relevant?

Anthony Kennedy doesn't start there. He starts with a different question: What work is actually worth doing?

His career has been built inside global organisations. Goldman Sachs in the late 90s, where he fell into an in-house agency role and discovered how deeply you can understand a brand when you're inside it. KPMG, where he built their in-house capability from the ground up. ION, where he scaled an internal creative services function called Impact across 13 offices, 11 time zones, and 15 specialist teams.

Then he stepped away. Earlier this year, Anthony made the choice to work independently – advising senior leaders on AI adoption, in-house team design, and the future of marketing roles. It's the kind of move that only makes sense if you've already figured out what you're actually good at.

And he has. Deeply.

What Anthony has learned through his career – and what he's now using to advise other organisations navigating AI – is that the threat isn't what everyone thinks it is. The threat isn't AI. The threat is average work. And AI has already replaced it.

His reference point comes from David Droga, the legendary creative leader who recently gave an exit interview where he said something that landed hard: ”AI has already replaced. It's better than average. Nobody should be trying to save the average.” This isn't doom. It's clarity. If AI can do average work better than humans can, then the conversation shifts. The question stops being ”how do we protect average work” and becomes ”how do we do work that AI can't do.”

For Anthony, that's where the real leverage sits. Not in fighting technology. In understanding what technology can't touch – and building teams and organisations around that.

The episode covers the practical reality of this shift. Anthony talks about building in-house teams at the scale he managed at ION – and why in-house agencies matter more now than ever. He talks about the difference between pressure and stress, and why most leaders confuse the two (spoiler: it's about whether you have your task list under control). He shares his hiring principle – ”don't hire a**holes” – and why that rule has held across every organisation he's worked with.

But the core of this conversation is about the tools themselves. Anthony uses AI deeply and daily. Six apps on his phone that he engages with every single day. ChatGPT with custom GPTs built around his Gallup Strengths Finder results, so every query comes back with advice tailored to his strengths and guidance on what to delegate. Claude for specific types of creative work. Mistral to create prompts for other AI platforms. Gemini. ProtonLumo with integrated file storage so he can capture ideas on the move and have his AI projects reference them next time he returns.

This isn't theoretical. This is someone who's thought about how to work in this era and is now building the infrastructure to do it well.

The uncomfortable truth he keeps coming back to: 94% of companies are adopting AI into their workflows. Only 6% of people have been formally trained on it. That gap is where the real problem sits. Not the technology. The preparation. The training. The clarity about what you're actually trying to do with these tools.

This episode is for leaders who feel the shift happening and aren't sure where to stand. It's for marketers who know average work is disappearing and wondering what that means for their career. It's for anyone trying to figure out whether they're under pressure (which is manageable) or stress (which breaks you), and whether they've actually got the fundamentals right – clean data, good systems, people who know what they're doing.

Anthony doesn't have all the answers. But he's asking better questions than most. And his experience building inside complex organisations has taught him what actually matters when the work changes.