You are publishing more content than ever. So is everyone else. And somewhere in the rush to keep up, a lot of it started to sound the same.

David Ebner, President of The Content Workshop, has a blunt explanation for why. "A tool doesn't know what good is."

In this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast, host Erik Martinez and David Ebner get into storytelling in the age of AI: why so much of it reads like word salad, what actually separates good from generic, and why the speed everyone is chasing might be the very thing making the work worse.

David has spent 13 years telling brand stories, and he does not think AI is the problem. He thinks the problem is that most people never learned what good looks like before they handed the work to a machine.
There is a specific thing David does before he ever hits the magic button that most people skip. Miss it and you get slop at volume. Get it right and the tool starts turning you into something closer to a superhuman writer.
Listen to Episode 114 to hear where human creativity has to stay in the process, and why good was always good no matter how it gets made.

Erik Martinez and Pat Barry made their AI predictions six months ago. Agents, AI shopping, rising costs, governance. They were right about almost all of it, and almost none of it showed up the way they expected.

Pat keeps running into the same pattern across every organization he works with. Someone has quietly built something remarkable with AI. When Pat tells them to share it, the answer is always some version of "yeah, they're not really into it." The capability exists. It's invisible. And nobody is asking why it stays that way.

Meanwhile, Erik went from spending his days in Excel, PowerPoint, and Canva to doing ninety percent of his work inside tools that didn't exist in their current form six months ago. Pat's building entire training decks with agents that get him 85% of the way there in a quarter of the time. AI platforms are turning into the new office suite, and most people haven't realized the shift already happened.

Token costs are climbing and Erik describes trying to track them as "absolutely maddening." One of Pat's healthcare clients made a governance decision that positioned them as what Pat calls "the team of the future." A university with 50,000 employees and access to the same tools can't keep up.

The predictions were about what AI would do. What actually changed was how the humans work. That gap is the conversation in Episode 113.

Most agencies have someone who's figured out AI better than anyone else on the team. They built the custom GPTs. They know the prompts. They're the one everyone asks when something breaks.

Now ask yourself: what happens if that person leaves tomorrow?

"If your agency relies completely on one AI champion, the agency's progress is limited to one resignation."

Ishant Kulshreshtha, AI Strategic Analyst at White Label IQ, joins host Erik Martinez on Episode 112 of the Digital Velocity Podcast to talk about what it actually takes to move AI knowledge out of one person's head and into the organization.

Ishant shares a practical 30-day process any agency owner can start today, explains why the data your agency has been collecting for years is more valuable than any tool you could buy, and makes the case for why building AI capability is a team sport, not a solo act.

If you've been relying on one person to drive your AI progress, this is the episode where you find out what you're actually risking.