Parliament: Race to the Top
I heard something on Diary of a CEO this week that I haven't stopped turning over since.
Seth Godin was the guest, and the way he framed AI right now is the sharpest version of it I've heard. Either you work for AI, or AI works for you.
Godin's read on the leaders choosing to work for AI is blunt. They have no imagination. They're cutting cost as fast as they can and calling it strategy, because it's the only move they know how to make. That's the race to the bottom.
The other option is the one worth building a company around. AI works for you. You lead. You stay trusted, connected, and in charge of the thinking, and AI does the doing underneath you. The question people racing to the top are actually asking isn't how do I cut cost. It's how do I make this more human.
I sat with that question for a long time, because it's the one we've been answering at Hoot without ever putting it in those words.
We built The Bird House on this bet. Every Brand Being Method™ workshop we run there is high human input by design. A founder sits across the table from us for two days straight. That work doesn't get faster or better because AI joins it. It gets faster and better because AI joins everything happening around it, working for us instead of the other way around.
Claude is in the room for every one of those workshops, but it isn't leading anything. It's capturing the whiteboard while we stay locked on the founder's face. It's turning two days of conversation into a working draft before we've even left the building. It's doing the part of the work that was never the valuable part, so the time we spend actually sitting with a founder can be entirely, uninterrupted, ours.
We also use Claude after the workshop to flesh those ideas out further, into a full brand narrative, a strategy document, the language a founder will actually use. And here's the part we don't say publicly enough: without the facilitation that happened in the room first, without the pushback and the rumble and the founder getting uncomfortable enough to say the true thing, that output is trash. Organized, on time, and worthless.
Claude can only build something sharp out of what we hand it.
That facilitation takes more than just holding space for the rumble, too.
It takes judgment, and it takes taste.
It takes someone in the room who can recognize a brand thread the moment it goes by, because what's ho-hum to a founder who was born into their own story is often the most remarkable thing in the room to everyone else. The founder can't see it. They've lived inside it too long. It takes an outside eye with enough experience to spot the thing that's actually new, which is the part AI still can't do. And then it takes the judgment to know, right there in the room, that this particular thread has legs, that this is the narrative that's going to resonate — so keep digging right here.
Claude can write beautifully once we've handed it the right thread. It cannot walk into a room and find the thread in the first place.
That's what it looks like when AI works for you instead of the reverse. Not replacing the workshop. Protecting the time we spend in the room, so none of it gets lost writing things down instead of looking someone in the eye.
We want to be known as the most human agency in this business, which is really just our answer to Godin's question: how do we make this more human.
It starts with people doing the most human work first, before AI ever touches the doing.
We call it brand therapy sometimes. Get that part right and the doing gets easier and more efficient, not less.
Skip it because you think you're saving time, and you're not saving anything. You're just moving the cost downstream, to a place where it costs a lot more to fix.
If you want to make a living doing this work in the next ten years, you're going to have to create value somebody can feel, and no model creates that alone.
