OpenAI Became a Consulting Firm. Are You Still Worried About Your Job Security?

If you’re reading this, you already know the game has changed.

OpenAI became a consulting firm. “AI slop” is now in the dictionary. Swatch learned the hard way that AI can out-imagine your own product launch. Google proved that a $100 device with the right AI layer can challenge a category leader. And I went on camera with two experts to talk about the risks of f*cking up with AI, and the biggest growth opportunity hiding in plain sight: your website.

Welcome to LRND™ Intelligence. Let’s get into it.

When Swatch teased its collaboration with Audemars Piguet in early May, it did what it always does — withheld the product and let anticipation build. What it didn’t anticipate was AI filling the void. Within hours of the teaser going live, AI-generated renders of what the Royal Pop might look like flooded social media, and every watch forum. They were beautiful. Polished. Catalog-ready. Then Swatch revealed the actual product on May 12: a pocket watch. A lanyard. Something closer to a Labubu than a Royal Oak. The real watch looked nothing like the AI mock-ups — and a lot of people wished it did.

What it means for you: The teaser campaign — one of marketing’s most reliable tools — just got disrupted by a technology Swatch didn’t control and couldn’t compete with. AI has moved so fast that it’s an entirely different world from when Swatch launched the MoonSwatch. I have the Mission To Moonphase Snoopy edition myself. When your audience can generate a better-looking version of your unreleased product before you reveal it, mystery as a strategy has a problem. The brands that win the teaser game going forward are the ones that make their real product so surprising it beats whatever the internet invented in the gap.

On May 7, Google unveiled the Fitbit Air — a screenless wearable that retails for $100, aimed squarely at Whoop, which costs $199 a year on subscription. I’ve been wearing a Whoop for three weeks now, so this one landed close to home. The device tracks heart rate, HRV, blood oxygen, sleep staging, and skin temperature continuously — no screen, no notifications, no swiping. The hardware almost isn’t the point. Google Health Premium, which unlocks the Gemini AI coaching layer, is optional at $10 a month — meaning the AI coach is the upsell, not the device. The same week, Whoop announced a $575 million funding round backed by Abbott and Mayo Clinic, positioning itself deeper into preventative healthcare and clinical-grade monitoring — moving upmarket exactly as Google moves down.

What it means for you: The health wearable market just bifurcated cleanly — mass consumer AI health at $100, clinical-grade longevity intelligence at the premium tier — and both are using AI as the core value proposition, not the hardware. The marketing implication is bigger than fitness: the biggest differentiator isn’t the hardware, it’s the AI coaching layer. Whichever brand teaches its AI to understand context — not just data — wins. A bad recovery score after a red-eye is different from a bad recovery score after a full night of sleep. The brands that figure out contextual AI first will own the category.

Merriam-Webster named “AI slop” its word of the year for 2025, and if you work in marketing, you felt that landing. The term — used to describe the flood of generic, machine-generated content that has overtaken feeds, inboxes, and ad units — is now dictionary-official. And yet five months into 2026, brands are still producing it at scale.

What it means for you: The most important distinction in 2026 is not AI versus no-AI. It’s visible versus invisible. The brands winning are using AI aggressively for targeting, personalization, timing, and optimization — while protecting the human voice on the output side. AI as infrastructure. Human as author. The brands losing are the ones who outsourced both. “AI slop” is not a creative failure. It’s a strategic one. It’s what happens when efficiency becomes the brief.

On May 11, OpenAI launched DeployCo — $4 billion, 19 investor firms, and the single most interesting detail: Bain & Company, Capgemini, and McKinsey are founding partners. Three of the world’s largest legacy consultancies co-investing in what Axios called “a direct competitor to their own transformation practices.” The mechanism: Forward Deployed Engineers embedded directly inside client organizations to redesign workflows and build production-grade AI systems. They acquired Tomoro on day one, adding 150 deployment specialists. I’ll be honest — when I read this, my first call was to Jordan Edwards, Founder & CEO of ZForge, the Palantir advisory firm I’ve been consulting for. This is exactly the model we’ve been building toward — embedding AI expertise directly inside organizations that need it, not just selling them software and wishing them luck.

What it means for you: The AI model stopped being the bottleneck. Integration, workflow redesign, and organizational buy-in are the actual constraints — and now the company that makes the model is in the business of solving them too. The window to be the person who knows where AI fits inside a client’s business is narrowing fast. OpenAI just validated the entire thesis. The question is whether you’re building that capability now or waiting until the market prices you out of the conversation.

I sat down this week with Eric Holtzclaw of Liger Partners and Johnny Sengelmann of Blu Mountain for a webinar on B2B growth in the AI era. We were supposed to talk about what’s working. We ended up talking about what isn’t.

Here’s what we kept coming back to: AI is an extraordinary accelerant. It is also, in the wrong hands, an extraordinarily expensive mess generator. The brands and agencies that are winning right now aren’t the ones who deployed AI the fastest — they’re the ones who knew exactly where to deploy it and where to keep a human in the room. There’s a difference between AI doing the work and AI amplifying the work. The first one scales mediocrity. The second one scales expertise.

What it means for you: The question that firms are going to start asking — if they haven’t already — isn’t “are you using AI?” It’s “who’s accountable when it goes sideways?” That’s not a technology question. That’s an expertise question. The agencies and partners that can answer it clearly are the ones that will still be in the room five years from now. Want to watch the webinar? Click here.

Thanks for reading Issue No. 06 of LRND™ Intelligence. We’ll be back with more of what matters — no filler, no fluff.

→ Want to talk about your brand’s strategy for 2026? Let’s connect.

LRND™ is an AI-powered, independent creative, development, and media agency. We employ equal parts man and machine to deliver work that works.