Short on time? TLDR: I went to the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON) 2025, quit my job shortly after, and started building. Here’s why.
It’s been a little over four months since I returned from MAICON 2025 in Cleveland (nice city you have there, Ohio). It was a world-class conference, and it’s easy to see why it continues to grow year after year.
The conference was transformative in ways that I’m only now beginning to realize, and I owe a debt of gratitude to Knowmad Digital Marketing for the opportunity to attend. I doubt there were many other Idaho-natives there (if so, I didn’t see your identification potato), and the immense value of the experience was not lost on me.
The Industry Thought Leaders Didn’t Disappoint
I can’t summarize the breadth of speakers and topics here without creating a mini-dissertation, although that is my preferred style of communication. Suffice to say, sessions and discussions were led by those operating at the tip-of-the-spear in AI, and it was enlightening.
I will quickly shout-out some of the speakers I had the opportunity to hear, see, and meet with: Wil Reynolds, Andy Crestodina, and Paul Deraval each stood out for different reasons.
Wil Reynolds (Seer Interactive): Positioning His Agency to Lead in the Era of AI
Wil is genuine to the point of being blunt. As a former Marine, I dig that. He’s also a leader who clearly trusts his team and pushes them to take risks and innovate. When you think of someone who can spearhead an agency in the AI era, he’s the type of leader you envision. There weren’t a lot of “I” statements from Wil when I spoke with him at the social (clad in an Eagles hoodie nonetheless – Go Birds). Instead, he talked about the accomplishments of his team and others he was working with, and talked passionately about what they were building together. Wil was generous with his time, and extremely easy to converse with. I’ve followed him on LinkedIn for years, and thankfully, he’s exactly who he appears to be.
Andy Crestodina (Orbit Media): A Thought Leader Online and In-Person
Andy is another speaker I’ve followed on LinkedIn for quite awhile. He’s a natural teacher, and that was all the more obvious during his sessions, which were packed with actionable insights, and delivered with the same clarity and passion that makes his online content so good. There’s the old saying “you should never meet your heroes”. At MAICON, you can dump it in the trash. People like Andy openly and freely shared their expertise, invited challenging questions, and were approachable in ways that only the most sincere and genuine of people can be. That was across the board.
Paul Deraval (NinjaCat): Proving AI Can Be Used for More Than More Output
Paul was something different altogether; a nice surprise out of left-field, honestly. A lot of AI talk these days is centered around improving productivity and work quality, and increasing revenue per worker. Paul’s session was a needed reminder that AI can be inspiring too, enabling us to blend creativity, function, and the ability to delight. He shared some of the things NinjaCat has built using AI, and it wasn’t just stuff that was functionally efficient, but actually fun to see. I especially liked the performance dashboard that looked like an old video game interface. It took me back to the bygone era of the late 1900s (as my daughter likes to say; she’s reaaaaaaal funny, that one). Why limit AI to simple synthesis and completion of repetitive tasks when it can also be used to add that extra layer of “wow” to something? It’s something I hadn’t really considered before.
There were so many more speakers that impressed, and it’s a shame I can’t call them all out (Liza Adams, Xiao Ma, Angela Pham, Keith Moehring, Jeremiah Owyang), but if you get the chance to attend MAICON in 2026, trust me, it’s worth it and you won’t be disappointed.
Fanboying Over; Here’s the Real Reason I Wrote This Post
On the flight home from the conference, I knew my days working at an agency were numbered.
You might assume that’s because AI is coming for marketing roles. Companies are already looking at ways to replace human employees with AI, and pivoting to a career less apt to be touched anytime soon would seem intuitive (professional cat-whisperer, perhaps). But that wasn’t the driver.
What hit me at MAICON was simpler than that: the same capabilities allowing large companies to “streamline” are simultaneously empowering individuals and small teams to compete like never before. Not eventually. Right now.
While agencies and established companies are figuring out how to integrate AI into daily operations, a process that can feel like turning a cruise ship in the ocean, agile individuals and small teams can explore, test, and establish themselves. The barrier to entry is low, but entry doesn’t mean success. For those with strong foundational knowledge and a willingness to build, there’s a whole new world out there, and it’s a lot more promising than what I experienced when playing Oregon Trail in elementary school (damn you, dysentery).
What I kept coming back to on that flight was this: AI doesn’t just enable faster work, it fundamentally changes who gets to compete and how. Expertise and initiative can now outweigh headcount and budget. We’re in a window where the size of your team is no longer the limiting factor in building something that can go toe-to-toe with established players. But it requires taking the leap.
So, Here We Go
I informed my previous employer of my intent to depart shortly after returning from MAICON 2025, agreed to support transition, and departed in mid-December, spending the last two weeks of the year decompressing (playing video games), re-centering (avoiding video calls at all costs), and getting ready for the work I knew would need to be done (watching Ex Machina and I, Robot on repeat).
It’s already been what I hoped for, and the first two months of 2026 have been some of the most fun I can remember.
I finally had both the time and the energy to pursue the platforms, skills, and work I’d been sidelining for too long. I’ve been building what I want, not what others need from me, and it’s led to a clearer understanding of how things can be built and operationalized better.
In the past couple of months, I’ve built:
- A Next.js + Headless WordPress website in the time it used to take me to build one using a traditional WordPress + theme build.
- A web app for market position research that helps me identify and translate organic visibility into revenue opportunity.
- AI Agents that run accurate, detailed research and technical audits leveraging Screaming Frog CLI and DataForSEO API
AI isn’t going to bastardize what works in modern search marketing, it’s going to allow marketers to attack the entire ecosystem, leveraging the levers that drive tangible business results based on accurate research and implementing high-quality work that aligns with current best practices. It won’t do everything, not yet anyways, but it’ll do the 80% of things that need to be done in every situation so experts can focus on the 20% of things that win for a client’s specific situation.
It also frees us up to think about what’s next. Today, consumers are still driving the search and buying process themselves. Tomorrow, agents may handle that end-to-end. We don’t know when, but the shift is coming, and I want to be ready for it.
The big dawgs think AI will let them cut headcount and boost margins. Maybe. But it hasn’t exactly played out that way yet. Perhaps the real advantage of AI is what it enables the little guys to build and achieve.
That’s what I’m betting on: WebMCP, agentic optimization, voice-native search experiences — the infrastructure for how people will find and choose businesses a year or two from now, not how they did it a year or two ago. The window to build for that future is open. It won’t stay open forever.
