The Canary in the (AI) Coal Mine

Posted on by Bret Starr

The Perfect Cocktail: AI, Marketing, and TSC

Here’s the recipe for this article about AI in B2B Marketing.

I combined equal parts AI, Marketing and TSC. I stirred it slowly for a very long time. And, finally, I added a single cube of ice. (It should be cool, not cold.)

No garnish.

I served it in a highball glass. It’s a stiff drink, so pace yourself. Take small sips, or it will go straight to your head. I probably don’t need to tell you that a libation this strong can cloud your judgement. But denial? That’s more like a Mind Eraser.

And now that we’ve shared a metaphor, let’s chase it with an idiom.

Professional Services are the Canary in the Coal Mine

Most tech companies don’t recognize the suffocating power of disruption until the air is too thin to breathe.

I felt it coming a few years ago. (And I have the receipts to prove it.)

Even before ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, I had come to believe that AI was more than a tremor in the mine (like the metaverse or blockchain). And it wasn’t the cloud either. Or mobile. Or social. Those were quakes—big shifts that rattled the walls but didn’t bring the whole tunnel down.

In tech terms, those things were upgrades. They bent the arc of technology, but they didn’t shatter the axis of human work or challenge the foundational systems, values, and structures that allow society to exist, function, and remain stable.

If SaaS was an upgrade, AI is a hard reset of the operating system.

Back to the Lab

Once I recognized the disruptive potential of AI for B2B marketing, I did what I always do. I went back to the lab.

For the last two years, I’ve worked with AI every single day. Not tinkering. Not dabbling. Working. There are the things people hope AI can do. And the things they fear it can do.

Make no mistake: it can do both. And more. Every day it gets stronger. AI isn’t just disruptive. It’s an epistemic rupture.

The AI Paradigm Shift

I hate the phrase “paradigm shift.” It’s overused, lazy, and usually meaningless. It’s a platitude. But in this case, it’s the only phrase that fits.

When Thomas Kuhn coined the term in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), he explained that a paradigm shift isn’t just a big change or a new trend. It’s when the underlying framework that explains how the world works collapses and gets replaced with something entirely different. The old framework doesn’t just evolve—it becomes obsolete.

  • Before Copernicus: the Sun revolved around the Earth.
  • After Copernicus: the Earth revolved around the Sun.
  • Same sky, same stars, but suddenly they mean something totally different.

That wasn’t an evolution of thinking; it was a total replacement of the operating system for human understanding.

AI isn’t just another tech cycle like SaaS or mobile. Those fit inside the old paradigm. They made things faster or easier, but they didn’t change the underlying framework. I often joke that in the early days of SaaS, each new solution was like that “Put a Bird On It” bit from Portlandia. “Look at this sad little job application made of paper. Let’s put it on the Internet!” AI is not a put-a-bird-on-it proposition.

If SaaS was an upgrade, AI is a hard reset of the operating system.

AI changes the way we think about intelligence and work itself. It redefines what problems can be solved, who (or what) can solve them, and how decisions get made. That’s what makes it different from every tech cycle anyone alive today has ever experienced. AI is not an upgrade; it’s a new operating system. A truly new paradigm in human history.

Don’t Look Up!

For professional services, the AI Paradigm is an existential threat. Like an asteroid hurtling toward Earth at 160,000 miles per hour, it may look slow from a distance—but impact is inevitable. Every model built on billable hours and armies of smart people grinding through knowledge work is at risk. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not the work that will suffer. It’s the business models that can’t adapt (and the people who won’t) that will.

I know this because I’ve run an agency for 25 years. A pretty good one. But since late 2022, we’ve struggled as the old models of marketing lost their edge. That’s on me. I hid in the lab trying to perfect our AI strategy instead of leading with fast, imperfect marketing solutions that could evolve in the real world.

Conventional B2B marketing is broken. I wrote the book on it. The thesis is simple: the old SaaS marketing playbook—blocking, tackling, optimizing—has collapsed because everyone is running the same machine. The way forward is holistic customer experience: designing defining moments across brand, marketing, sales, product, and customer success that shape perception, build preference, and create an advantage no one else can copy.

But I left something important out of my book: even the best strategy won’t save you if you’re still running the same tired machinery. The blocking-and-tackling apparatus of B2B marketing has to be torn down and rebuilt on AI. We need specific approaches to AI for B2B Marketing. Otherwise, your perfect strategy and brilliant content will simply drown in the rising ocean of channel noise.

Why rebuild on AI? Because the economics of human-scale marketing no longer work. It now takes 10x more effort to generate the same results as five years ago. Only companies swimming in venture capital can afford that kind of brute-force output. And the SaaS industry? It’s been swallowed by private equity—who aren’t exactly known for doubling down on marketing spend.

You might think I’m complaining. But I’m not.

What shall we do when an asteroid is headed towards planet marketing? In the movie Don’t Look Up, people wasted time arguing about whether the asteroid was real instead of building a plan to survive. That’s what we’re doing about AI in B2B marketing right now.

Asteroid or coal mine—it doesn’t matter what metaphor (or idiom) you choose. The point is the same: denial buys you nothing. Remember, professional services might be the first to suffer, but everyone is in the mine. Especially tech companies.

So what do you do when the canary stops singing?

You get the hell out of the mine.

Risk and Failure Are Part of Innovation

The Starr Conspiracy (TSC) isn’t waiting for disruption to swallow us—we’re becoming the disruption. We’re tearing down the old agency model and rebuilding on AI, not just because we have to, but because our clients desperately need it.

Here’s the truth: the work we’re doing right now isn’t coming out of some perfect lab experiment. The lab is over. We’re shipping fast. We’re iterating in real time. We’re failing and learning right alongside you. Risk and failure aren’t side effects of innovation. They are the definition.

Every company will face the same choice. Disrupt yourself—or be disrupted. When you’re ready, we’ll be here.

AI Transformation for B2B Marketing

In the AI era, the strategic foundation of marketing matters more than ever. Things like strategy, brand, message and customer experience design. Without a strong marketing foundation, AI will only turn garbage into a landfill. While TSC continues to deliver the foundational marketing services that made us famous, the way we deliver them is much different now.

We’re not talking about tossing ChatGPT at your problems and hoping for the best. We’ve built advanced capabilities for AI in B2B marketing into the work itself—accelerating research, sharpening insights, automating repetitive tasks and otherwise empowering our people to create better work at a higher velocity.

But changing the way we approach and deliver Marketing Foundations is just the beginning. Building on two years of AI innovation, we’re rapidly iterating on five other lines of AI-native marketing services:

  • AI Foundations—We’ll meet you where you are. If you’re still figuring out the basics, we’ll help you learn what matters most so you can actually put AI to work.
  • AI Enablement—We’ll roll up our sleeves with you. Together, we’ll pick the right use cases, set up the best ai tools for B2B marketing, and teach you how to run them yourself.
  • AI Managed Services—If you’d rather not do it yourself, we’ll just handle it. We’ll build, run, and optimize the AI systems you need so you can lock in on other stuff.
  • AI Innovation—This is where we go beyond the basics. Custom (fine-tuned) models, new applications, advanced platforms—solutions most agencies can’t touch.
  • AI Transformation & Leadership—We’ll help your whole company make the leap. From policies and adoption to beating your competitors with AI-powered products, this is the big shift.

That’s our AI transformation system for marketing: foundations made stronger with AI, enablement that teaches you while you build, managed services if you want it done for you, and innovation and transformation for companies that want to win the AI race in their category. Wherever you are, drop a pin and we’ll meet you there.

Tough Choices

Every company, every leader, every team stands at the same fork in the road: be disrupted, or be the disruption. Waiting it out isn’t a strategy. It’s surrender.

To some, what I’m doing at TSC might look reckless. We refactored the agency from the ground up for the AI era. Along the way I’ve made some great calls—and some really bad ones. We’ve lost people. We’ve stumbled. We’ve fallen on our face a few times. That’s what transformation looks like. It’s messy. It’s painful. And it hurts.

But when I went back to the lab to work with AI, I saw the future. And once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it. You either start dismantling your old machines on your own terms—or wait until the machine collapses on top of you.

So what do you do when the canary stops singing? You get the hell out of the mine.

As Hamilton puts it in The Room Where it Happens:

When you got skin in the game, you stay in the game. But you don’t get a win unless you play in the game. Oh, you get love for it. You get hate for it. But you get nothing if you … wait for it, wait for it …

The Positive Side of the Disruption

Every disruption carries dread in one hand and hope in the other. AI will absolutely destroy the old ways of working. But it will also create the possibility of abundance like we’ve never seen before. If you’re willing to tear down what no longer works and rebuild around the new operating system for human potential, then you have limitless opportunities.

And look—I don’t need to waste three paragraphs convincing you that people matter. Of course they do. That’s the obvious part. Every agency on the planet is going hoarse shouting “humans are still at the center” like they just discovered fire. Fine. We agree. But when they talk about “the power of AI,” it’s all vague headlines and disclaimers. They spend more time telling you what AI can’t do than what it actually can. Why? Because they don’t know. They’re quietly hoping someone else will figure out the hard part—the non-obvious part—so they can just plug and play.

If you’re not the waiting type—if you’d rather crack the hard part faster than your competitors—here are some things you can start doing right now.

Every company will face the same choice. Disrupt yourself—or be disrupted.

How to be the Disruption with AI in B2B Marketing

  • Accept that AI is a paradigm shift.
  • Strengthen your strategic marketing foundations.
  • Integrate AI into your B2B marketing and daily workflow.
  • Destroy your marketing machine and rebuild it with AI at the core.
  • Create defining moments in customer experience that AI can’t replicate.
  • Be the first in line when AI companies unlock paid advertising.
  • Prioritize speed over perfection.
  • Embrace the ecosystem. No single AI tool will save you. Integration is an advantage.
  • Make customer experience your unfair advantage, and let AI do the heavy lifting underneath.

If you can dominate the AI marketing landscape before your competitors do, you’ll have an advantage that will last for years. This is one of those rare opportunities to change the pecking order by doing something truly different—not the same old thing done a little better.

That’s the formula. Simple to write. Hard as hell to live. But if you want to build enterprise value in the AI era, that’s the work in front of you.

Say what you want about The Starr Conspiracy. Say what you want about me. It’s nothing I haven’t heard before. As I’ve said, “If everyone agrees with you, you’re doing it wrong.” I get knocked down a lot, but that’s what happens when you’re the first one through the door.

You may not believe AI is a paradigm shift. Fine. But tell me with a straight face that it won’t completely rewire marketing. You can’t.

I choose to be the disruption. You should too.

Now, what’s my name!