Hyperscale: Power and the Pace of Change — Part 3B

Hyperscale: Power and the Pace of Change — Part 3B

Make the Donuts Faster: AI, Agents, and the Gap Between Hype and Reality

Jon Judah has advised some of the largest companies in the world on digital strategy. In Part 3B, he describes what artificial intelligence is actually doing to the businesses building it — and what’s still mostly promise.

By Danny Cardwell  |  Allegheny Mountain Radio  |  Supported by the Listening Post Collective

In Part 3A, Jon Judah described where the AI industry actually is right now. Not transformation. Access. The depth, he said, is still catching up to the breadth. In Part 3B, the harder question: when a technology moves this fast, does the company doing it still need the people around it?

DEPT® has built digital strategies for companies ranging from major manufacturers to Lululemon, Nike, and Adidas. Jon’s answer to the obsolescence question was honest in the way that only someone watching it from the inside can be.

Embrace It or Get Left Behind

The technology behind AI isn’t new, Jon pointed out. What ChatGPT did was blow it open — make it feel like magic to people who had never seen it before. For companies like DEPT®, that created both pressure and opportunity. Clients began asking questions they hadn’t asked before: how are you using AI? Are you generating our images with it? Are you using it to QA your code?

“There’s a disclosure element to that that usually starts the conversations with our clients. And then more often than not, a lot of our clients are saying, we don’t know how to hire or what we need to do. Can you help us figure out which of all these tools are worth it?”

— Jon Judah

That uncertainty, he said, has created a different kind of opportunity for agencies willing to be honest about it. Not hype. Disclosure. The companies that are winning right now are the ones being direct about what they’re using, how they’re using it, and what it still can’t do.

The Intern in the Room

Jon’s clients aren’t alone in trying to calibrate what agents actually are right now. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described where the technology stands at Snowflake Summit 2025 in plain terms: today AI is like an intern that can work for a couple of hours. At some point, he said, it’ll be like an experienced software engineer that can work for a couple of days. That gap — between intern and engineer — is where most of the industry lives right now.

Jon sees the same thing from inside the agencies. Some of his more advanced clients are already using agents to simulate customer behavior before running campaigns — building a spec of a middle-aged soccer dad and modeling how they might respond, instead of running months-long focus groups. That’s novel. But it’s not the norm.

“A lot of companies, like I said, are still just like — make the donuts faster. That’s where they’re at.”

— Jon Judah

Make the donuts faster. That phrase — from someone who advises some of the largest technology companies in the world — is the most accurate description of where most businesses actually are with AI right now. Not transformation. Efficiency. Not the future. The present tense.

Personalization and the Creep Factor

Jon also described one of the areas generating the most excitement inside the marketing world: personalization. AI’s ability to customize messaging at scale — from emails to ad copy to customer interactions — is drawing companies in, he said, because they’re all fighting for some of the same customers. The goal is to make it feel personal. To make it feel, in his words, a little more like Danny Cardwell. He acknowledged the tension in that directly. There’s a creep factor. People don’t always want a company all up in their business. But the technology makes it possible, so companies are going to try.

In Part 3C, Jon gets personal — as a father, as an educator, and as someone who grew up in this community. What does he want young people in Bath County to understand about what’s coming? And why do we still need humans?

Listen to Part 3B above.

Part 3C: The Hard Close — Jon on Education, Identity, and Why Humans Still Matter

Supported by the Listening Post Collective  |  MacArthur Foundation / Internews

All five parts will be available at alleghenymountainradio.org

Allegheny Mountain Radio  |  Listening Post Collective  |  Danny Cardwell