Everyone over forty has the same complaint about everyone under thirty. They don't want to pay their dues. They skip the fundamentals. They don't learn the process. They want to run before they've learned to walk, and they think a shortcut is the same thing as a path.

I think it might be time to reassess those points of view.

I've started to wonder if the process was ever the point. We made people learn it. We made them sit through it, absorb it, repeat it until it was muscle memory. I don't think we did that because the process was sacred. We did it because it was the only way we had to hand down knowledge. What if the knowledge of the process was no longer necessary because the outcome of the product was so much easier to realize?

Back in the olden days, you didn't get to make the thing from the beginning. You got trained on how to build the thing. You watched the thing being made. You took notes and hypothesized different ways to make the thing. You sat in the back of the room and absorbed how the people with the “big” jobs thought about the work. Learning the process was your apprenticeship. I may have lucked out because when I started in this business, the channel was brand new, and so while there was a process, most of it was irrelevant and could be reimagined quickly. That’s no longer the case. Or is it?

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That journey of learning the process protected us as much as it trained anyone. The process was a moat. It kept the work in the hands of the people who'd already learned it, and it made sure the next person had to come the long way around, same as we did. We called it earning their place. These days, you don’t need to earn it because you can reimagine it, as we did.

I wrote in my MediaPost column recently that AI will create more jobs, not fewer, and some of the comments were understandable, but I had a logical reason for making the point. For most of history, having an idea wasn't enough. You had to have an idea and the team to execute it. In those teams, there was a process. If you didn't have the team and the process, your idea died in a notebook. AI closes the gap between the idea and the thing to be built. Now, anyone with an idea can chase it, and they don’t need a team, and they certainly don’t need to know the old process. They don't have to get hired, get trained, and wait for their turn to get permission to build. They can just build.

So a whole generation is coming up that may never have to learn the old process at all. They aren't asking how it was done before. That question doesn't even occur to them. They're asking a different one. What should exist? Then they go make it exist. They start with the product. The process is whatever gets them there, and if it doesn't exist yet, they invent it on the way.

You can build something now quickly and let the market decide if it’s any good. The AI tools will let you ship before you've developed the instinct to second-guess whether it's worth shipping yet. You can avoid product-market fit for a time and quickly push out an MVP, letting it find product-market fit. The process is no longer the point. In this brave new world, there are no boundaries, no borders, and no guardrails. A product can be built, launched, and tested rather than built, tested, and launched.

The product generation can build anything.

I keep coming back to Don Draper. I know he wasn’t real, but he was the epitome of an ad guy. Draper is the apex of the process generation. He doesn't just have the idea. He carries it into a room, reads the faces, lets the silence do some of the work, and walks out with the account. The idea needed him. It needed the performance, the authority, the years of standing in rooms and losing some of them. That was the craft, and it was beautiful, and it took a lifetime to build.

The product generation doesn't pitch the idea. They ship it. They don't walk it into a room and ask you to feel something. They put the thing in front of you and let it argue for itself. No performance. No permission. The work shows up already built, and it either holds up or it doesn't. Think of the implications for data-driven advertising in that situation. Would Don Draper ever succeed again?

The future doesn't belong to the people who know how it used to be done. It never did. It belongs to the people who can see what should exist and go build it, before anyone gives them permission and before they've earned it the long way around. That is a very exciting thing to look forward to.

I hope you enjoyed the column this month. Don’t forget to click on the advertiser (Catch) and sign up to become a member of The Social Fabric.

Cory