Publisher's LetterYour AI Teammate Is Not Your Replacement
Pick tasks nobody loves. Give them to AI. Notice what comes back into your calendar.
The point is not to disappear behind a bot. The point is to stop spending my best hours on sorting.
Hello ambitious achievers!
We spent two days in Seattle with the SUCCESS team last week. We focused on how we talk to each other, how we build the magazine, and how AI fits without turning us into a content factory.
One theme kept landing. Treat AI like a teammate, not a toy and not a boss.
On day one we talked about feeding our AI collaborators the same context we give humans. User guides. How we like to work. What drains us. What a good week looks like. When Claude or Grok knows those things, the output stops sounding generic. It starts sounding useful. A few people even ran empathy interviews with their AI, asking how to be a better partner to it. That sounds odd until you try it. Then it feels practical.
The other half of the conversation was sharper. Automate the busy work so humans can do the judgment work.
Our editor-in-chief, Amy, was clear about this for the magazine: AI is fine for production. Proofreading. AP style. SEO tags. Thumbnails. Pipeline chores that used to burn hours.
It is not fine for creative generation that dilutes voice or creates copyright fog. Print stays the mothership. Digital extends it. AI gives the team mental white space to write and edit like humans again.
I use it the same way in my own day. Intake for email and Slack. Distinguishing an FYI from a real ask. Turning long threads into workstreams. The point is not to disappear behind a bot. The point is to stop spending my best hours on sorting.
Busy work automated is not the product. Human judgment is the product. Curiosity is the product. The decision to publish something that helps someone find their own success is the product.
That same standard showed up in our brand and SEO talk. Content pillars tied to real questions. Print for authority. Digital for reach. AI for the grunt work that used to steal editing hours.
If you run a team, try this for the next two weeks. Pick three tasks nobody loves. Give them to an AI teammate with clear instructions and your standards attached. Keep the work that requires taste, relationships, and accountability on your plate. Then notice what comes back into your calendar.
We are building SUCCESS that way. Humans plus AI together. Ownership stays with people. Leverage goes to the work that used to slow us down.
More soon.
—Glenn