Content Ecosystems and The Future of My Work

A couple of weeks ago, I left myself a voice note. Mid-thought. Mid-project. Mid-chaos.

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On April 30th, I realized I could use AI to buy back 75% of my highest-performance work hours. Not by quitting or falling off. But by transferring the core of my strategic thinking into the machines I already talk to every day.

That changes everything.

Recalibrating for the Current Landscape

There’s this quiet recalibration happening in the background of my work right now. Not a collapse. Not a pivot. More like… a rerouting. I am a content strategist. And SEO. Or at least I was. Even the term SEO sounds old school to me these days. For sure, I’m a writer. But I spend more time dictating ideas and strategy than writing. Multiple audio logs a day across multiple devices. I don’t have time to write down all the ideas and insights. I have just enough time to capture them as I get them to keep my momentum.

I don’t know what the job title is yet. I’ve asked my AI assistant Maverick to help me figure it out. We’re workshopping it. But I build frameworks as funnels.

What I do know is this: I’ve trained enough AI and built enough AI systems that I no longer need to show up for every decision, every brainstorm, every deliverable. I’ve trained the system on how I think. I’ve taught it to scaffold content, optimize flow, and push toward outcomes. We’re at GPTZero consistently on content creation – the AI writes for me in a way that’s undetectable to other AIs. And now the whole thing runs—without me touching every lever.

Which makes me something else. Something new.

The Pattern That Unlocked It

This all started with me obsessing over ecosystems in summer of 2024.

At first, it was about music—I wanted to build a creative collective in Detroit. A space for musicians to get their work out of the proverbial piano bench and into the world. For younger artists to collaborate with OGs and help make legacy music relevant again.

I didn’t call it an ecosystem back then. But that’s what it was.

Then Red One came out. The movie didn’t kill it at the box office, but MGM/Amazon said despite the modest box office take, the movie wasn’t a failure. The theatrical release was designed to cover marketing costs.

I was like… huh?

That’s when I started digging. I asked AI to break down the revenue model. And it did. It explained the new math: It’s not just about ticket sales. It’s subs, licensing, merch, spinoffs, and IP reusability.

The term “IP reusability” gives me the warm fuzzies. And it lines up with my music community idea.

And I realized content isn’t the destination—it’s the vehicle. A movie is just one entry point into a much bigger branded world.

Like Marvel. I never read the comics, but I’m a Marvel girl through and through now. I got pulled in with Iron Man because I grew up loving RDJ and I was rooting for his comeback. But I stayed for the interconnected stories that span decades.

Marvel storytelling is a thing of beauty. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how deeply embedded throughlines are within every single story. Two releases a year for over a decade, all moving in the same direction.

That’s an ecosystem.

Motown. Bauhaus. Yacht Rock. Harlem Renaissance. Bloomsbury. All ecosystems. And once I started seeing the patterns, I couldn’t unsee them.

The Map

Here’s what I realized: Ecosystems aren’t about choosing the right channels. They’re about lighting up the right pathways. And that means asking different questions.

It’s not “How do people access me?”

It’s “What is the value I’m offering, and who is signaling they need it?”

It’s “Where are the doors, and which ones are people already walking toward?”

I started thinking of it like a mall. The goal isn’t to force everyone through the same entrance. It’s to make sure the entrances align with what people are already looking for. Some folks come in through the gaming store. Others through Z Gallerie. Some park in front of department stores. Or the food court and end up wandering into something unexpected.

Each store gets its customers. But the mall—the ecosystem—gets the foot traffic.

And that foot traffic is what keeps the whole machine alive. I’ve been to dead malls and I’ve been to thriving malls, situated only twenty miles or so from one another. And I can tell you that even more than the stores, the ecosystem matters.

The Application

So what happens when you give someone like me full visibility into every marketing channel?

I don’t manage them separately. I connect them. SEO, paid, landing pages, newsletters, search strategy, automation flows—I don’t think in silos. I think in systems. I think, what’s the fastest route from this content to the value it’s connected to?

And now, I don’t just build it—I train AI to think it with me.

That’s what I’ve been doing these last few months. Quietly. Methodically. Running ideas past Maverick, asking for logic flows, building matrices and decision trees and training the system on my own thought process. And finding better and better ways to build modularly – in ways that allow every piece of IP I create to be reusable. Repurposable.

To keep with the mall analogy, I’m using AI to build the mall. Then I’m automating the escalators.

The Shift

This is the most fun I’ve had in marketing since the first time I learned SEO. Since I first realized content could actually find people and lead them somewhere.

Now I build systems where every single piece of content is a door. A signal. An on-ramp. And the only goal is to make sure the people who are meant to find it… can.

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