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Christopher S Penn
In the spirit of sharing what we build, here’s the process I use with AI to generate most things, most days: Deep research ensemble: if it’s important, I’ll conduct 5 different deep research projects on 6 different platforms: Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, DeepSeek, and Qwen. The last two are important! Make sure you’re using AI
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Christopher S Penn
“You’ve got to stay ahead of the curve with AI!” So said the LinkedIn post. To be sure, I wholeheartedly advocate that you learn to use AI because it’s eating everything. But something struck me as funny about that turn of phrase, staying ahead of the curve. Humans live on a logarithmic growth curve. Because
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Christopher S Penn
Best practices are the bee’s knees. A lot of folks, especially our usual lot of LinkedIn “gurus” love to shit on best practices. I’m the opposite. I can’t get enough of them, and I constantly want better and better best practices. Let’s look at a concrete example. I’ve been downloading tons of open source software
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Christopher S Penn
GPT-5 mini. Claude Sonnet 4.5. Gemini Flash 2.5 These were the previous generation (aka 2 months ago) state of the art, high speed, low cost AI models. Not as smart as their Pro brethren, but good enough that they were the day to day work horses of tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. What could
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Christopher S Penn
Are you a V-shaped professional? For years, management consultants batted around the concept of the T-shaped professional, the T-shaped marketer. Surface-level knowledge for most things, really good at one thing. You might be an email marketing wizard, and have surface knowledge of organic search, direct mail, Google Ads, etc. but you couldn’t reasonably do those
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Christopher S Penn
“AI cannot think critically.” was the LinkedIn post by yet another AI guru. Are you kidding me? AI excels at critical thinking for most common uses. It’s one of the things it’s best at, thanks to reasoning models. Let’s look at the textbook definition: “Critical thinking is the process of analyzing available facts, evidence, observations,
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Christopher S Penn
In case you missed it today, if you’re not great at a specific piece of software, agentic AI that has browser capabilities can give you a huge hand. At the 18:37 mark in this Trust Insights livestream, I let Claude take the wheel in setting up a Google Analytics 4 Exploration. I gave it the
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Christopher S Penn
As budgets get tighter and AI gets ever smarter, one thing to keep in mind for your company, from solopreneur to enterprise, is that there may be an option to roll your own software, whatever the software is. For decades, hobbyists in the open source community have created incredibly capable pieces of software that mirror
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Christopher S Penn
I am totally okay with “business as usual” on PUBLIC social media sites in these uncertain times. Gandalf, Elrond, and the Fellowship did not meet on Mordor’s doorstep and loudly announce their intentions. They met in secret in Rivendell. Gandalf didn’t even tell the Fellowship what the overall plan was, whether they’d all be going
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Christopher S Penn
One of the ways I stay grounded is a morning walk with my spouse and dog. We follow the same general route each morning, and we bring along a trash bag and a trash picker. Along the way, we pick up litter. The first few times I did this, it was weird. Then it became
