For 17+ years, I lived in the world of digital marketing, ad operations, and process optimization. I managed campaigns, led teams, and spent way too many hours drowning in spreadsheets, pivot tables, and manual reporting.

I'll never forget inheriting a team that had to manually update 35 to 50 PowerPoint decks every single month, Some with 25+ slides each. It took them 10 to 12 business days. Every. Single. Month.

I also had a massive client running 25+ campaigns across 5 platforms. Updating their performance data in Excel took me 5 to 6 hours every Monday morning. It was exhausting, soul-crushing work that stole the joy out of what I loved doing.

So I automated it.

First with Looker Studio, then Power BI. What used to take me 5 to 6 hours became 15 minutes. What took my team 10 to 12 days became 2 to 3 days. Suddenly, we could breathe again.

But here's what really shifted everything for me: AI could handle the grind, but it couldn't tell the story.

AI could pull data, format slides, and crunch numbers—but it had no idea what mattered to the client. It didn't understand nuance, emotion, or strategy. That still required human intelligence. That's when I realized AI isn't the enemy or the answer—it's a collaborator.