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For months now, everyone’s become an analyst, calling for an “AI bubble.” A crash. A correction. And sure, there’s speculation everywhere. But the whole debate misses the point. So, as someone who builds strategy around AI for marketers, let’s explain it the only way that makes sense: with John Wayne. Hang-tight.

It’s the 1850s. America is drunk on steel, gold, and ambition. Any book or movie from the era featured a railroad company. Usually the villain. The unstoppable force of progress. The company that bought outlaws, crushed small towns, or simply paid its way across the continent.

In the rare stories that show how those railroads were built, it’s absurd: any lunatic with a map and a telegram connection could raise money to build tracks to somewhere. Say “transcontinental” and you'll get funded.

Saloons doubled as boardrooms. Bar fights were shareholder meetings. Speculators bet entire towns on the chance that rails would pass through someday. It was chaos. It was glorious. It was what progress always looks like before it has a plan.

And then, almost all of them vanished.

Erie. B&O. Pennsylvania Railroad. Union Pacific. Central Pacific. Northern Pacific. All gone, folded, merged, or bankrupt before the tracks even rusted. Entire towns disappeared because no one bothered to check where the routes actually led.

You already know. Vanderbilt, Hill, Harriman. The ones who bought the wreckage for pennies, stitched the lines into networks, and ran them efficiently.

But the real winners? They never laid a single track.

Rockefeller, Carnegie, Western Union. They made fortunes on top of the rails. Oil, steel, and telegraph. They controlled what moved on the infrastructure.

That’s where the American century began: not in invention, but in standardization and leverage. The nowadays romanticized American Exceptionalism wouldn't have happened without this.

Every revolution runs on the same choreography:

1. Innovators. The pioneers. They build first, dream big, and go broke.

2. Operators. The system builders. They clean up, standardize, and scale.

3. Ecosystem players. The quiet empire builders. They leverage the rails and define the century.

Innovators make noise. Operators make systems. Ecosystem players make history.

It's the same with everything. Colombus? Got the statues, died almost poor. Trade companies got rich off colonisation. French Revolution? The first wave mostly got beheaded (Robespierre), then we've got Napoleon, then the consolidation of nationhood in Europe post-Napoleon.

Need more proof? Look up. Aviation. The Wright brothers, Curtiss, Douglas, and Lockheed. The dreamers. Only Lockheed survives, and only because it pivoted to defense. Then came airlines: Pan Am, TWA, KLM, British Airways. Huge operations, small margins. If they survived, they did so only because of alliances and networks. And finally, the ecosystem: tourism, logistics, credit cards, and hospitality. Entire economies built on flight.

Different eras, same scripts.

We’ve gone from John Wayne to Sam Altman. Congrats!

And please... Stop calling it the “dotcom bubble.” That wasn’t a bubble. It was a rush. A rush burns capital to build infrastructure. A bubble just burns time. 2008 was a bubble. The dotcom era was a land grab. The first ones went under, but the survivors (Google, Amazon, eBay) systematized and became infrastructure.

Now it’s happening again.

OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, they are the modern Wright brothers with GPUs. Every week, a new breakthrough drops, costing a small nation’s GDP. Everyone’s overfunded, cross-invested, and overhyped. That’s not a flaw. It’s the price of building tracks at scale.

We’re entering the operator phase. Post-railroad-building.

OpenAI is evolving from product to platform. Databricks, Snowflake, and others are wiring the pipelines. Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, AWS, they are turning AI into enterprise plumbing. And for marketers? Notion, Adobe, and HubSpot are all racing to become the operating systems of creative work.

Very soon, ecosystem players will come. They won't even mention AI. They will just build on top of it. Entire industries will be built upon autonomous logistics, predictive manufacturing, creative automation, etc. The money won't be made on API calls and tokens. It will be made on the control of the flow of information.

Marketing is the perfect playground for AI. It’s flexible. It’s chaotic. It’s rich in data but poor in structure. As marketers, we build brands with rented tools. We run on caffeine and approval loops. We generate content, insights, and noise faster than any other function. We’re the low-hanging fruit. The first department AI can actually organize.

That’s why we built AI Ready CMO.

We don’t sell shovels for the gold rush. We sell maps. How to dig and where to build. We help marketers move from trying tools to running workflows. From exploration to execution.

Because the railroad age of AI is over. Now it’s about who builds the network that everyone else runs on.

Upgrade to become a paid member and get access to the maps.

From next week, we are making changes to our editorial cadence.

Free members get daily emails. One AI story. One learning. One framework. They also occasionally get a weekend edition, like this one, where we take a look at the big picture.

Paid members get access to our learning hub with workshops, Q&As, 1:1 advisory, and resources. Plus, a weekend edition, just for them, with a trend report on what matters in AI marketing, now. Clarity for those who need it most.

This will be the greatest shift we make since the inception of AI Ready CMO. We feel that we have grown up, found our pace, and are ready to scale our offer to every marketer who wants to level up with AI.

We are thankful for you being with us on this journey.

— Peter & Torsten