Innovation Without Discipline Is Just Faster Slop | Sean Richards - Concordia University

I just recorded the season opener of Tech Marketing Rewired with Sean Richards, and it set the tone a lot more great conversations this second half of the year.

Sean is an adjunct professor of marketing communication at Concordia University, and he runs creative for a living as a copywriter and creative director. That combination is why I wanted him to open the season. He teaches this stuff to Gen Z students every week, and he actually uses it in his own creative work. He is not the doomer academic you might expect. He is also writing a musical about Bigfoot, which we absolutely get into at the end.

This season is called Past the Pilot: what marketers are doing now that the AI experiments are over. Sean sets the table for all of it. We got into why most teams are nowhere near past the pilot, and where human judgment still wins. He did not disappoint.

Here are my main takeaways.

Sean’s read on the job market runs more optimistic than most of what you’ll see on your feed. He thinks a chunk of the AI layoffs are really a delayed correction from COVID-era overhiring, with AI as the convenient cover, and he expects the pendulum to swing back.

“A lot of companies are over their skis, and they’re using AI as the convenient excuse to reduce headcount. In the next two to three years, after all these dot-AIs get washed away, you’re going to see the quiet rehiring happen. People come back at lower levels and a lower price point, and companies quietly get Gen Z back in the workplace.”

My take: I think he’s right. The token math backs it up. I have the $200 Claude plan, and one research group estimated that if you max it out, you’re burning something like $8,000 a month in actual tokens. That gap is a subsidy, and subsidies end. Once running these tools at full tilt gets priced honestly, the “replace everyone” math stops working, and companies start hiring humans back. Probably at lower levels and lower cost, but back. I also am doing more work than ever and I think that feeling will eventually hit the market once the execs realize that the agentic age actually creates more opportunity than we’ve ever had. My predication is that hiring is going to spike in the next 2 years.

AI was sold as a way to give creative teams more time to think. In Sean’s experience it mostly raises the quota, and without real discipline what comes out the other end is slop.

“The fallacy was that AI is going to give you more time to be creative. No. It just gives you more time to create more slop and quicker outputs.”

My take: Sean had a client ask his three-person team for 30 research articles in a week. Pre-AI that is impossible. With AI it is merely brutal, which is exactly the trap. The tool raises the ceiling on volume, so volume becomes the new floor. The line that stuck with me is that you are only as good as the inputs you give AI. Point the thing at a vague brief and you get vague output, faster. The discipline is the whole job now.

Ask a C-suite whether the company is past the pilot and you’ll hear yes. Ask the people doing the actual work and it looks very different. Sean sees teams handed an end-to-end AI mandate with no training and no guardrails, and the result is predictable.

“So many folks are being told to be an end-to-end AI expert without any kind of guardrail. As a result you get more and more slop, more confusion, and people getting laid off, pushed out, or burnt out.”

My take: This is the heart of the season. In my own conversations with CMOs, the story is almost always the same. The team is told to go do the AI thing, but they don’t have the keys. No access, and no time to learn it properly. So of course it stalls. Sean pointed to Canva as the model: they cleared the decks and gave everyone a full week to do nothing but learn good AI hygiene. That is the healthier rollout. Start with the why, give people real room to learn, then build. Most companies skip straight to the mandate and then wonder why they get slop.

When I asked Sean where human judgment still wins, he went straight to craft. The more thought you put into the inputs, the more human the output feels, because a person is still driving it.

“The more thoughtful your inputs become, the more indistinguishable the output becomes, to where you think, this has to be human, because it had a very human touch. The creative process is still at play. You just have to think about it differently.”

My take: Sean writes music, so he used Suno as the example. Ask it for a generic country song and you get a generic earworm. Feed it real melodic ideas and a real back-and-forth with a producer, and the output gets good enough that you can’t tell. The human didn’t leave. The human moved to the front of the process and to the quality check at the end. That is the part you can’t automate: knowing what good looks like, informed by context. Skip that and you are just a faster slop creator.

Sean teaches, so he sees the education side up close, and he’s blunt about it. The model is overdue for a change, and the trait that matters most in a young hire is the one that never shows up on a transcript.

“Higher education is due for a reckoning one way or another. The thing that doesn’t transfer on a resume is grit. A young person with the drive to figure something out is worth more to me than any pedigree.”

My take: I have kids in college right now, with more on the way, so this one is personal. What I tell CMOs who can’t get their teams to adopt AI is to hire someone straight out of school who is already curious about it. They don’t need a computer science degree. A marketing grad who took one Python course and actually played with the tools will run circles around a stalled team. I hired my own son that way. He came in with a biology degree and one coding course, plus a ton of curiosity. Sean sees the same thing from the classroom, and he’s working to build that grit in his students before they graduate.

This is exactly the conversation I wanted to open the season with. Sean isn’t selling anything. He’s in the classroom and in the work, watching this play out in real time. If the rest of Past the Pilot is half this honest, we’re in for a good run.

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