April Showers

April showers may bring sunflowers

Today I decided to try posting on something other thank LinkedIn. I like the idea of making more of a newsletter/blog, and making it easy for someone to read by email. I’m not sure if I will ever charge for subscriptions, but I might try it at some point.

Right now the weather here outside of Chicago in Illinois has been getting a bit warmer, and by night the ground is creeping above freezing temperatures. Outside the temperatures are edging about where there is likely to be frost. So to me, it’s the start of a potential sunflower growing season.

In terms of my current day job, I’m approaching the end of the semester, and seeking to try and absorb what is changing in higher education and what remains the same. One thing that remains the same is that there are students, and fresh starts. People transfer in, or start as freshman, or begin a Master’s Degree, and in most cases the first time you meet them is in a class. But today I received a linkedin message from a student coming in the fall, saying hello and asking questions about marketing and AI.

I may try and focus on illustrating thoughts by simply telling stories from my life, and I told the student how I started teaching digital marketing, and transitioned to teaching mostly AI, and why.

Basically I worked in technical writing and then digital marketing as I was working on my PhD, and part of the reason I worked in digital marketing is because of the experience of the Great Recession in 2008. I had been working in areas adjacent to marketing, and with many skills used in marketing (writing, content development, graphic design, video editing), but I hadn’t really managed campaigns before.

But after being laid off as a senior Tech Writer at a web hosting company, I tried taking a look at what was going “up” and what was going “down”, including using a tool called Google trends, where you can type in a phrase or series of phrases, and choose a time period, and it will tell you the relative volume of people searching for things. Hopefully the various chatbots including ChatGPT will do something similar. The Google Trends function still works.

I had some idea of what might be going up and down, from hearing about social networking, starting a few years before - it wasn’t quite popular yet, Facebook was quite new, but things were on the rise. I believe I searched Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Google - and the search volume was all drastically on the way up.

So sometime after being laid off, probably 2008 but maybe later, I saw that social media and digital marketing (i.e. google ads), were on the rise - and that is when I made a concerted choice to try and evolve and learn what was on the upswing in terms of business. I also gradually learned that marketing is what actually sustains a business. (the marketing director at my company wasn’t laid off). I did have a good mentor too, a VP who was friendly, and met with me once, and said:

“Todd, you need to follow the money trail”

“What?”

“You need to learn more about how money flows in and out of business, including to make sense of when people are laid off”

So while I wasn’t a finance person, I started to pay more attention to how businesses actually worked, even as I also had been starting to work on my PhD by that point. My assumption is that I’d continue working until I found a full time teaching gig. That took some time.

But on the way, I got more involved in digital marketing, saw that it was a good decent career, in demand skill, and a growth area. For this reason, I eventually ended up starting to teach digital marketing courses at ben.edu, and wrote some books based on professional experience, to help students understand core areas and to help them get certifications that could help them get jobs.

That was 2014 when I started at ben.edu.

Then over the next several years, as I continued to be involved in seeking to keep up with emerging marketing techniques, I learned more about marketing automation, as well as starting to hear about artificial intelligence. Then eventually I started wondering when artificial intelligence might end up replacing the jobs that I was helping to prepare students for.

At first I was just asking the question: “will AI eventually be able to replace people doing digital marketing”, and then as I spent more effort learning about AI and advanced automation, eventually I came to the conclusion that yes, AI would eventually be able to do an increasing amount of marketing - and I wrote a free book called Surfing the Tsunami, for students and everyone else. It was an attempt to help marketing students prepare for AI, and encourage learning data skills, analytics and areas related to AI.

Then eventually AI got significantly more advanced, and shortly after ChatGPT was released in 2022, I started writing another series of books, somewhat in the pattern of the digital marketing books, but now focused squarely on AI. I decided to make the books free, and also proposed developing classes around the topics.

As I looked deeper and deeper into the data, I became convinced that AI would not just augment skills, but would replace entire jobs, and that the best thing for most people to do would be to learn everything they can.

Just recently as of Q1 2025, I came across a company called Digits, which had achieved “100% automation of accounting”, meaning doing the work of mid-level CPS accountants. This didn’t surprise me but it seems like a milestone, in terms of being able to point to AI directly in terms of the job consequences. The fact that various areas in business are being automated also has implications for the various students in my classes, including accounting majors, etc. - and what are they supposed to do?

The more I researched the economics of jobs and AI, the more I became convinced that the most secure position to be in for most people is to learn how to apply and design AI in their field, instead of being potentially automated out of a job.

And I did spend a number of years since 2017 studying the economics directly - eventually being invited by a nobel prize winner to review an early manuscript of their book. So while I’m not an economist per se, I have a pretty decent understanding of the trending. It’s something I never set out to do, but felt compelled to learn more, and over time, acquired expertise.

In terms of philosophy, I’m a realist. In some ways I’m pro-AI, because of all the good it can do. I’m also wary of some of the impacts. And I actually aspire to be an optimist, hoping that AI could bring more benefit than harm - such as discoveries in health and other areas.

But in terms of the job market at least, right now it seems like AI will disrupt more jobs than it creates — and that specific question is something I’ve looked closely at. I started from a neutral position, I continue to have an open mind, but what you mostly see on the topic is speculation, and mostly people referring to past industrial disruptions where there ended up being more jobs created in the end. (ex: electricity, other shifts).

But that rationale does not make sense to me except as an aspiration - and meanwhile the data and trending seem to be increasing that many more jobs are being disrupted than created. I’m in the midst of a number of conversations with various economists at the moment. I’ve even told myself “I’m going to set this down” - but I keep seeing articles that are either misleading, giving a potentially false sense of security (ex: “don’t worry about it”), or announcements that I think I should comment on in Linkedin, since a number of former students follow me, as well as a few other people.

So I guess that AI is probably a continued theme. I’m not sure if I’ll write about it here except in terms of telling stories about people and experiences that make me who I am, and which might be meaningful to readers.

This is also a bit of an experiment; I’d like to be able to write a bit longer format, and customize things a bit more, than you can on Linkedin. I also want to be able to keep things focused on LinkedIn.

Thanks for taking a look.

P.S. no need to do a paid subscription. They have a feature to “pledge” but also no pressure there. The main reason I’m doing this is to see if I can capture more of my lifes and thoughts about current events, in a way that can help people in the here and now. I’m also interested in sharing some of my thoughts and ideas on creative projects that I’m considering bringing forward, or starting to write short stories about, probably science fiction.