Minutes into teaching my business school class, I asked what seemed like an innocent question:

What is one word that describes how you feel about AI right now?

One word. That's it.

My students looked up, looked down, looked anywhere to avoid eye contact. Silence.

"I promise," I said, "this is a safe space." Something I'd repeat throughout the course—and I meant it.

Then the answers came quickly, and the energy in the room shifted as they arrived. You could feel the sheen of performance dropping away. They had permission to tell the truth.

Excited.

Overwhelmed.

Curious.

Uneasy.

Confused.

Terrified.

Chaos.

I walked in thinking I was teaching Marketing with Humanity in the Age of AI. What I didn't fully grasp until that moment is that I was also teaching a room of frayed nervous systems.

And marketing, for better or worse, is a strangely intimate place to watch the future collide with psychology.

In plenty of white-collar fields, AI can still feel like an idea: provocative, philosophical, removed from your day-to-day job.

In marketing, it already feels operational. Generative AI systems can draft campaign concepts, write variations, produce images and videos, create strategy outlines, summarize research, and automate workflows that used to belong to junior teams. That's happening now.

The business incentives are obvious. McKinsey estimates that generative AI could raise marketing productivity by 5 to 15 percent of total marketing spend, translating to roughly $463 billion annually.

And once you're staring at that kind of number, the rest of the conversation changes, too: the job forecasts, the re-org rumors, the "doing more with less" logic that's already seeped into white-collar life. The World Economic Forum projected that 23 percent of jobs will change by 2027, with 69 million jobs created and 83 million eliminated.

So, of course, my students assumed they were walking into a class to learn about tools. Prompting, workflows, synthetic personas, customer journeys, content engines. Whatever the current stack demands.

They weren't wrong to want that. When the future feels unstable, the mind reaches for what looks like certainty. It starts scanning for something you can grab.

And this is where it gets really interesting, and, honestly, a little heartbreaking.

Under uncertainty, people can become less thoughtful and more procedural. They look for the right formats, the right answers, the safest moves. Curiosity narrows. Risk starts to feel almost irresponsible. When you're........

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