In 1997, when I was 12, I started publishing professional wrestling news websites from my bedroom in Montreal. I promoted them in IRC chat channels, using mIRC, one channel at a time. Every page, every banner and every bit of promotion came out of my own hours. In 2013 I launched Emblaze One, an agency for web development, e-commerce and digital marketing. The tools were better, but the limit was the same: how many skilled hours we had.
AI moves that limit. I want to be specific about how, starting with what it actually does inside my companies today, because most writing on this subject skips straight to predictions.
How My Companies Use AI Today
Across my companies, AI shows up mostly in marketing and sales, and the work is less dramatic than the headlines. We use it for clerical work. We use it to organize files. We use it to build ad creatives. And we use it to build landing pages.
None of that is glamorous. All of it used to take people’s time. Clerical work and file organization are the kind of tasks that never make a company better but always slow it down when they pile up. Ad creatives and landing pages are where marketing and sales spend much of their effort: an idea has to become an ad, and the ad has to land somewhere that makes sense.
The lesson so far is that AI earns its keep on the work around a decision. The decision itself still belongs to a person. A tool can produce 10 versions of an ad. Someone still has to know which one is right for the brand, the customer and the rules of the category.
The Cost of a First Version Falls
A founder used to need a developer, a designer and a copywriter before showing anything to a customer. Now one person with the right tools can put together a landing page and a first round of ads quickly. More ideas get tested, including by people who could never have afforded an agency.
That has a consequence. A first version proves less than it used to. When anyone can build one, the advantage moves to whoever learns fastest from real customers.
It also changes who becomes valuable on a team. The people who matter most are the ones who know what good looks like and can steer the tools toward it. Judgment becomes the scarce skill. A team that can generate output but cannot judge it will produce a lot of mediocre work in a hurry.
What AI Does Not Change
Some parts of building a company stay stubborn.
Distribution still decides who wins. A great product nobody hears about loses to a decent product everyone sees. When everyone can make more content, there is more noise, and a trusted brand and real relationships become worth more.
Trust still takes time. In 2011 I sold the first KORE Fit Living franchise before our first corporate store had opened: an existing store in Burnaby, British Columbia, converted from Reflex Nutrition. The owner was committing to a brand that did not yet have a corporate store of its own. No tool would have shortened that conversation.
Accountability does not move to the software. If an AI tool writes a claim on a product page or in an ad, the company owns that claim. In regulated categories like supplements and payments, that matters a great deal. I believe every output needs a person who is responsible for it.
Speed Needs Direction
The risk I watch for is speed for its own sake. When building gets cheap, it is tempting to launch everything. Each launch still costs attention, customer support and brand trust. The founders who do well with AI will be the ones who use the time it saves to make fewer, better decisions.
That is also how I think about adopting the tools themselves. Start with the work that repeats and that nobody will miss doing by hand. Keep a person on everything that touches a customer, a claim or money. Expand from there when the results hold up.
How I Would Start a Company Today
If I were 12 again, I would still start with something I cared about and an audience I understood. For me that was wrestling, and the audience was in those chat channels. Then I would use AI for the parts that used to take weeks: the pages, the first ads, the files and the paperwork. I would spend the time I saved talking to the people I wanted to serve.
The tools are new. The job is the same: find people with a problem, solve it better than anyone else and keep their trust while you grow. You can see how that played out across the years in the profiles of Emblaze One and KORE Fit Living, and in the longer story on my About page.
