How to Become an AI Visionary (Part 2)
Plus, using AI like a management consultant
This is a paid subscriber post, including a free summary. Free subscribers, for access to the full post, please use the button at the bottom to explore subscription options.
Dear Prompt Experimenters,
I want to be an AI Visionary. How about you?
There’s a voice, right? A whisper, when you think about AI. It says: The world is about to change, in a big way, and you’re part of that. There’s a big, meaty, important role for you to play.
But what is it?
That’s the question.
It’s why I’m writing the AI Visionary Playbook, so we can figure it out together. (this white space is large enough that we can be partners, not competitors!)
It has three parts:
The Emotional Engine: Last week’s post. Start there, if you haven’t already. Before we even bother with the facts and figures, you need a mission, an emotional engine, something that will propel you forward and capture your audience, not through marketing gimmicks, but authentic commitment.
The Market Landscape: Today’s post. We’ll roll up our sleeves like management consultants. Let’s talk total addressable market, right to win, strategic optionality, and all those metrics upon which robust business cases are made!
The Path Forward: Next week. Your concrete action plan and (of course!) a personalized GPT coach to guide you along the way.
This post will assume you’ve already completed step one. The emotional engine is revving. Let build a business chassis on top of it.
Here’s what we will cover today:
Visionary pathway design: We’ll convert your “rage against the suck” briefs from last week into five specific AI Visionary pathways for you.
Consulting style market landscape analysis: We’ll use Deep Research, management-consultant style, to analyze the supply and demand for each pathway.
What it means for you: We’ll close with a prompt you can use to start processing all of this content, in advance of the more detailed action planning approach to come next week.
The post that follows is all-meat, including three mega-prompts you can use to go from “I think I want to be an AI Visionary” to “Ok, I’m starting to see how this could actually work.”
REALLY, DO STEP ONE BEFORE CONTINUING (please)
Why bother? Two reasons. You’re going to need the output for the next part. And because it’s a lot of fun.
Here’s an example of my own output from last week’s exercise:
🔥 Rage Against the Suck Brief: Content Pollution
🚫 What Sucks
The internet is drowning in garbage content — marketing disguised as thought, growth hacks masquerading as wisdom, and vapid posts begging for engagement ("Say hi if you have less than 500 subscribers!"). Substack is riddled with creators talking about how to make money on Substack. It’s a self-licking ice cream cone of hustle-culture nonsense.
This isn't just annoying. It’s corrosive. Content that adds no value is still rewarded with eyeballs, clicks, and dollars. We’re overwhelmed by sludge — and the worst part? It works. Bad marketing, as long as it's optimized, still performs. It hijacks attention that could go to something meaningful. It crowds out creativity, depth, and real value. It saturates feeds and platforms with noise, until we no longer know what “good” even means.
We're not just watching standards fall. We're being trained to lower them.
🧨 Root Cause Analysis
Incentive collapse: Platforms reward attention, not quality. The metrics care about clickthroughs, not contribution.
Marketing metastasis: Everyone is selling something — often how to sell. The content economy is eating itself.
Short-term obsession: Businesses optimize for growth, not trust. The long-term cost of polluting attention doesn’t show up on quarterly reports.
Weak cultural filters: We don’t have the language or norms to call this out. The word “scam” is too narrow. But this is a scam — just sneakier. It’s stealing your time and clarity.
🤖 How AI Can Help
AI could be our bullshit filter.
Personal content firewalls: AI models that learn your definition of value and act like a ruthless bouncer, blocking empty posts, SEO-churn, or engagement bait before you even see it.
Scam score systems: New vocabulary powered by AI — flagging content that’s likely to waste your time, dilute your focus, or exploit your attention under the guise of “value.”
Signal-to-noise audits: Tools that scan feeds, inboxes, and subscriptions to surface what's meaningful and bury what’s manipulative.
Counter-marketing engines: Imagine an AI agent that doesn’t just identify the grift — it explains it to you. It exposes the tactic, the funnel, the hook. Makes the invisible obvious. Transparency as armor.
This isn’t just about fighting spam — it’s about defending mental sovereignty in an age of infinite distraction.
DESIGNING YOUR VISIONARY PATHWAYS
Cut and paste all of your rage against the suck briefs into a single document. Upload. Run this prompt: