News & Insights — AI Marketing
The Most Expensive Thing in Business Just Became the Cheapest. What Are You Going to Do About It?
With intelligence now becoming nearly free you must be leveraging AI for business growth.
Think about where the money went in your business.
For decades, the answer was the same regardless of sector, size, or ambition. You paid for people. And the more intelligent those people needed to be, the more you paid. A skilled administrator. An accountant. A solicitor. A management consultant. A strategic advisor.
The hierarchy was clear, and the price reflected it. You were not paying for hours. You were paying for knowledge. You were paying for intelligence. The higher up the chain that intelligence sat, the more it cost you, and the more it was rationed as a result. You got the lawyer when the stakes were high enough. You brought in the consultant when the problem was serious enough. You hired senior talent when the business could finally afford it.
Knowledge and intelligence were expensive. So most businesses used them sparingly.
That equation has just been rewritten.
The Cost of Intelligence Has Collapsed
AI has done something that should stop every business leader in their tracks. It has taken the most expensive input in any organisation and made it, effectively, the cheapest.
The intelligence you once paid premium rates for is now available on demand, at scale, around the clock, for a fraction of what a single salary costs. Legal thinking. Strategic analysis. Financial modelling. Content creation. Code. Research. The kind of output that used to require a room full of expensive specialists is now accessible to any business with a subscription and the wit to use it.
This is not a productivity story. It is a structural shift.
The question is not whether AI is impressive. The question is what you are going to do with it.
Leverage the Inversion
When the most expensive element of your cost base becomes the cheapest, the right response is not to shrug and carry on. The right response is to fundamentally rethink what your business can now do that it could not do before.
Start with the problems you never solved. Not because you lacked ambition, but because the solution was prohibitive. The research that would have taken months. The process you could never afford to automate. The product you shelved because building it required a team you could not justify hiring.
Those constraints no longer exist in the way they did.
Every business now has access to a level of intelligence and capability that was previously reserved for organisations with deep pockets and large headcounts. The playing field has not just levelled. It has been redesigned entirely.
Every Business Is Now a Software Business
Here is where it gets interesting. And where most businesses are still not paying attention.
To truly leverage AI, you do not just use it to write faster or think harder. You use it to build. You solve your business problems with technology. You create tools, systems, and platforms that compound your intelligence over time.
That makes every serious business a software business, whether it planned to be one or not.
> I say this as someone who spent years resisting that label. I am a marketer and strategist by trade. Building software products was not part of my plan. And yet, in the past twelve months, I find myself with five live projects that simply would not have existed without AI. Not because I changed who I am. Because AI changed what was possible for someone like me.
A marketing automation platform. An AI-powered travel planner. An estate planning tool. A climate change intelligence system. An investor-grade pitch infrastructure. None of these required me to become a developer. All of them required me to think clearly about the problem I was solving, and to leverage the intelligence available to me to build the solution.
That is the opportunity sitting in front of every business right now.
Do Not Wait Until It Is Too Late
The window here is not infinite. Every month that passes, your competitors are either catching up or pulling ahead. The businesses that move now will build compounding advantages. The ones that wait will find themselves trying to close a gap that keeps widening.
But I want to be clear about what I am asking you to do.
I am not asking you to become an AI evangelist. I am not asking you to invest in technology for its own sake or to chase every new tool that lands in your LinkedIn feed. Most of those conversations get stuck on the tool itself, on the model, the interface, the demo, and miss the point entirely.
Forget the AI. Focus on the problem.
What does your business need to know that it cannot currently access? What could you build, automate, or deliver if intelligence was no longer rationed by cost? What has been sitting on your strategic to-do list for years because you could never justify the resource to pursue it?
The resource exists now. The intelligence is available. The cost has collapsed.
The only question left is whether you are going to use it.
Ronnie Findlay is the founder of TREC Digital, an AI-powered digital marketing consultancy, and the creator of the Loop Marketing methodology. He works with brands across Europe to help them turn AI capability into commercial advantage.