Obsessed with AI Shortcuts?

Why most wishes backfire and how not to waste yours

Bear’s Wish for Love

I watched Curry Barker’s new horror movie Obsession this weekend, and I couldn’t stop thinking about AI and marketing shortcuts (which means I am clearly obsessed with this topic).

In the movie, Bear, a sweet but painfully shy guy, has loved his best friend Nikki for years and has never worked up the nerve to tell her. So he buys a novelty wishing willow at a crystal shop, and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone else on Earth.

The wish works instantly, and that’s when the fun (and the screaming) begins. Nikki’s new love for him arrives fully obsessed and completely wrong. She’s sweet one minute and unsettling the next, possessive, intense, and way too eager to clear everyone else out of Bear’s life. I won’t spoil the rest, and I’d suggest watching it this Halloween with the lights off. But there is a lesson here for leaders about AI.

Bear’s wish is like the one many business owners make with AI. They want AI to take over sales and marketing and just make their clients love them. They want to skip the slow, vulnerable, human work of earning someone’s affection and just wish it into existence instead.

In the movie, this wish becomes a nightmare, and in business, it usually does, too.

We see the wish in our inboxes every day: “Hi {FirstName}, I loved your recent post!” from someone who never read it. AI slop posts, purchased followers, and AI comments that sound eerily close to human, but not quite. They manufacture the look of a relationship without any of the substance, and we can all feel the difference.

True love is the one wish that can’t be granted, because the moment you force it, it stops being real.

Trust Is the One Wish AI Can’t Grant

AI showed up like a genie, ready to grant wishes, but giving that much power to something that doesn’t have our best interests at heart is dangerous.

About 300 years ago, Charles Perrault wrote a fairy tale about a poor woodcutter who is granted three wishes. He goes home, sits by the fire with his wife, gets a little hungry, and without thinking wishes for a sausage. Poof, one sausage appears.

His wife is furious that he wasted a wish on dinner, and she lets him hear about it. The woodcutter gets angry and makes an even dumber wish. He wishes the sausage were stuck to the end of her nose. Poof, again it comes true. Now a sausage hangs from his wife’s face, and the only way out is the third wish, which they spend rescuing her, only to end up right where they started.

Three wishes, zero progress, and the worst fight of their marriage. It’s a funny story until you notice it’s the AI marketing roadmap for most of the companies right now.

The Wishes of AI-First Marketing

The first AI wish leaders make usually sounds something like, “Make it faster and cheaper.” Write fifty SEO blog posts with AI this month instead of four written by a human. Send ten thousand “personalized” emails before lunch, instead of having the BDR write them all.

That’s the sausage wish: easy, instant, and useless the next day. You end up with a pile of content and a bunch of automated activity nobody asked for, but what do you do when you burn through your list and the results aren’t there?

Sales are down, the pressure builds, and someone at the top makes the angry second wish to double down on their plan. Cut the team, replace the writers, and automate more follow-up so no prospect goes untouched.

That’s the sausage on the nose, and it’s attached to the people closest to you, the ones most valuable to the company. Your marketing team has an AI sausage on their face that you mistakenly wished on them. Your team is exhausted and starts wishing for a new job.

The third wish is the rescue. A year later, the fresh budget goes to cleaning up the mess: rehiring the expertise, repairing your brand reputation, and apologizing to the customers who got the robot treatment.

Three wishes, and you’re back at the starting line with less cash, fewer clients, and a team that doesn’t trust you.

It always starts with an obsession for an easy way out.

Have the Difficult Conversation First

I’m convinced most bad decisions happen because we don’t have the uncomfortable conversation with the people who matter. In Obsession, Bear could have just told Nikki how he felt. With AI, we can involve our teams and clients in the discussion.

Most AI rollouts happen after a leader hears a pitch and decides alone to rub the lamp. They hope the genie knows what the business needs, but AI doesn’t care the way your people do.

My advice: Before anyone makes a wish, slow down and ask better questions.

• Where and how should we use AI, if at all?
• What problem are we solving that a customer would notice and appreciate?
• Which work needs human judgment, and which work is a chore nobody will miss?
• Who’s accountable when the output is wrong, since AI can’t accept accountability?
• Would I put my name on the result and be proud of it?

Protect what humans do best, delegate chores with safeguards, and stop taking shortcuts nobody should have taken in the first place.

The ironic thing is that it’s much cheaper, faster, and easier than trying to undo bad wishes.

Making Better Wishes

Human-first wishes are different. They are generous and smart. These grow your cash, your relationships, and your people, which means every wish leaves you with more to work with for the next one.

The first wish is to give your people their time back. Give AI the required but unfulfilling work, like reformatting, summarizing, and rough drafts, and let your team use the reclaimed hours to do the inspired work only your humans can do. You’ll get more time, energy, and creativity, instead of less.

The second wish is to build your reputation. Use AI to help you publish more useful, more honest, and more personalized material. Do the hard things that earn trust, like publishing that real case study, having the tough client conversation, or refining the point of view that separates you from your competitors.

How can you use AI to show up more credibly and reliably?

Bear wished for love; you’ll earn it by doing the hard parts others don’t have the time, money, or guts for. Earned trust holds up when things get scary.

The third wish is to deepen the relationships you already have. Let AI remember the details, prep you for the call, and draft a thoughtful follow-up, so every customer and partner feels more connected after talking with you. That’s the opposite of a typical AI chatbot, pitch-slap, or marketing automation sequence. It amplifies the human conversations and connections.

Be Obsessed with Being Human-First

If your early wishes burn cash, bridges, or people, you’ll eventually hit a moment when things break down, you and your clients feel isolated, and everyone starts blaming each other. Budgets tighten, a big client churns, a competitor launches the shiny new thing, and suddenly you need to make a hard decision. That’s when you’ll be dying for another wish.

If your first wishes are human-first and generous, you may hit the same moment, but this time with a team that trusts you, customers who vouch for you, and a budget that never got torched on tokens. Instead of turning on your people, you’ll turn to them.

That’s why some businesses make it through the ups and downs of disruption and uncertainty, while others struggle. They have their people, clients, and resources to save them, while most of their competitors spent their wishes on sausages and artificial relationships.

Wishing Was Never the Problem

Every wishing story seems to teach the same lesson. The genie, the woodcutter’s wishes, the fairy in the forest, and Bear’s One Wish Willow all grant exactly what you ask for, and the trouble comes from a wisher obsessed with the shortcut.

It seems like we still haven’t learned the lesson. AI is the most powerful genie any of us will meet in our careers. Be careful what you wish for.

I’m making mine as carefully as I can. Some days I still catch myself tempted by shortcuts, but for now, I’m wishing for a stronger team, customers who trust us a little more every month, and the chance to keep doing this long enough to build our reputation and help more people.

So what’s your next wish?

Before you make it, find out what people and AI already believe about you. Your free Human+AI Trust Score shows where your reputation is strong, where it’s thin, and the top three ways to earn more referrals and recommendations from bodies and bots.

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