AI isn’t the teammate. It’s another teammate.

I just sat there watching ChatGPT work its way through HubSpot. Opening screens, clicking buttons, building fields, following the guardrails we had worked through together.

I knew what it was doing. My background is in marketing, and I’ve spent plenty of time around HubSpot and workflows. But I don’t do that work every day anymore. It would have taken me forever to remember where everything lived and how to connect it.

Watching it happen in real time honestly blew my mind.

It started with someone else’s good idea

The whole thing started about a month ago at a SmarterX workshop. Someone mentioned the idea of an AI readiness assessment, and I thought, “That’s actually a good idea. Could I build one for our website that people would genuinely want to interact with?”

So I went home and started working through it with Claude.

It wasn’t one prompt followed by a perfect finished product. It was a conversation. I brought the questions, experience, judgment, and what I wanted people to get from it. AI challenged me, organized the thinking, and helped turn the idea into something real.

A couple of hours later, I had an assessment I was proud to show my partner, Jeff Culliton, and a few other people. Their reaction was basically, “This is actually pretty good.”

Then: why stop there?

We put it on the website. At first, I only wanted to receive an email if someone completed it. No massive funnel or elaborate follow-up plan. I just wanted to know if anyone found it useful enough to finish.

Then I started thinking: why wasn’t I connecting the assessment to HubSpot? Why wasn’t the information becoming actionable?

That’s when I moved over to ChatGPT and started working through the next phase.

It helped pull the assessment information into HubSpot, build the workflow, send a follow-up email, and give someone the option to schedule a conversation.

This wasn’t initially driven by some grand lead-generation strategy. I was curious. I wanted to get into the weeds and understand how all the pieces could connect.

And at 59 — or honestly any age, this part isn’t just for the “over-50 experimenting with AI” crowd — that is incredibly exciting to me.

No extra points for degree of difficulty

There’s a Warren Buffett line I’ve always liked: you don’t get extra points for degree of difficulty — business isn’t the Olympics.

That’s kind of what this felt like. I wasn’t trying to prove I could do it the hard way. I just wanted to see what was possible now.

AI didn’t create this without me. It couldn’t have. The result came from my experience, ideas, questions, judgment, and willingness to keep working through it.

But I also wouldn’t have built it this way, or this quickly, without AI.

One that can help each of us turn our own unique experience and curiosity into something better than we might have created before.

The assessment described here is live: take the AI Readiness Assessment. If you do, I’d genuinely like to hear where it was useful — and where it could be better. Buffett line: Berkshire Hathaway 2020 annual letter.