In Formula 1, milliseconds separate winners from everyone else. Every adjustment, every fraction of ride height, every split-second decision compounds into victory or defeat. In marketing, it’s the same principle, but the stakes are business growth.

AI is ushering in a divergence between the most innovative and the mediocre. Consider the popular observation, noted here by one of my favorite analysts Dror Poleg, that “one top-notch engineer is worth ‘300 times or more than the average.’” He writes about the “rise of the 10x class,” which AI is only making more real. Balaji recently noted that AI amplifies intelligence: “The smarter you are, the smarter AI is. Better writers are better prompters.”

This divergence is also happening to entire agencies. The ones embracing cutting-edge tools and processes are pulling dramatically ahead while others are falling behind.

Last week I downloaded a new app called Willow so I can dictate my thoughts. After 24 hours, Willow told me I dictated 1,000 words, calculating my dictation speed to be 117 words per minute, nearly triple the typing average of 40, which means I saved 25 minutes of typing (and 5,000 key presses) after just one day.*

Twenty-five minutes is a long time, and I’ll only get faster as I build the habit. The website’s headline says you can save an hour a day with the app. I can see that. This savings compounds: I now have one more hour each day to devote to the craft, to strategy, even to rest to be better tomorrow.

Multiply this across every team member, every process, every client interaction, and you can see how the best teams become exponentially better. The performance gap between agencies embracing the best tools and those stuck in the past is an order of magnitude.

When you choose an agency operating at this level, you’re buying exponential advantage over competitors working with average agencies. The best are building what I told our team is “the Formula 1 car for marketing,” where every hundredth-second counts.

At the same time, efficiency isn’t everything—running a business is complex and requires balance. I’m with Wendell Berry on nurturing the work of local culture or even Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. Health, in many ways, is more important than scale.

And yet AI is in fact changing everything. To be the best at what we do—and to change the trajectory of your business—we have to continually innovate and reinvent ourselves. We have to combine the best tools in the business with the best service to continue to win.

That’s exactly what we’re building. Our new app and the processes around it will help marketing operations 10x output compared to the average marketer. I can’t wait to tell you more about it.

Want to talk about tools that can improve your productivity? Reply to this email.

As always, we’re grateful to serve.

*As a small aside, I can see how this workflow lends itself to spatial computing, which Apple will likely talk about at their September event on the Vision Pro 2.