The Stones Are All Around Us

Imagine yourself on Brighton Beach...

You have a nail and a piece of wood, but no hammer. All around you lie stones. Would you struggle with the task of connecting them both?
From my late 2025 experiences, I've learned, many people would.

I was recently invited as a consultant to sit in on a conversation about digital marketing. Present were the account manager, agency experts, web developers from another company, and from the client side, the CEO and a consultant from one of their teams.

The topic: tracking programmatic advertising. One of the countless (many times pointless) conversations held every year about data accuracy, systems, and how it all fits together. Yes, the CEO was present (?).

But the CEO’s agenda was different. While the team debated technicalities, the CEO was signalling something urgent: act, or restructuring would follow. And we all know what that means.

Back to the conversation. The conclusion was:

• We have a solution applied last week.
• Let’s test it (because we didn't yet).
• Then wait—idle—for weeks while robots “learn,” burning budgets in favour of the multibillion-dollar organisations that own them.

In other words: hand over data, trust the algorithms, and believe they’ll generate wealth for our CEO as much as for the giants who built them.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. On a beach full of stones, the majority chose to wait for a hammer to arrive in a month rather than pick up one of the multitude of stones lying at their feet and get a result earlier.

In algorithmic projects, one of the greatest dangers is overfitting. It’s not just a mathematical term—it describes how people interact with algorithms too.

In this meeting, no one seemed aware of their situation. The push for more data, the contented acceptance of “findings,” all ignored the many other options available. The CEO was desperate, yet the team refused to use the stones around them—refused to act quickly and efficiently in the client’s interest (their own interest).

Even if singularity is far off, meetings like this show how quickly people are accelerating robot emancipation—by shelving their own brains.

And the CEO? I’m disappointed to say that even now, they might find more comfort and solutions from a competing company’s large language model than from six humans supposedly expert in these platforms who are employed to guard the interest of the client's company.

The misunderstanding of humanity’s position in today’s world—and of the tools now surrounding us—is more pronounced than at any time in the last 50 years. The lack of holistic approaches and rapid or pretended education about our changing environment is beginning to hurt.

Perhaps the solution is to label each rock on Brighton beach:
Rock, but also:

• Hammer
• Toy
• (...) [imagination]

[KK]
A Stone-Age Era Promoter

Enjoy the rest of the festive season and all the best for 2026