the moment it clicked

I want to tell you about a moment at Web Summit I keep coming back to.

I was three days into the noise.

40,000 people. Demo after demo. Every founder on stage trying to prove how smart their AI was.

Somewhere around the hundredth pitch, I felt that low hum of boredom — the one you get when everyone’s saying the exact same thing.

Then somebody said one line I haven’t been able to shake.

“Your AI shouldn’t make you look smart. It should make your customer feel capable.”

I actually sat up in my chair.

Because right there, quietly and a little uncomfortably, I realized something:

We’d been building it backwards.

For years I thought the job was to look impressive.

Smarter funnels. Cleverer automations. The most advanced agent in the room.

But sitting in that hall, it landed on me like a brick:

Nobody buys because you’re impressive.

They buy because you made them feel clear, confident, and capable of getting where they want to go.

Impressive is about you.

Capable is about them.

And a confused buyer — no matter how impressed — never buys.

When I got back home, I went through our last few client builds with new eyes.

The ones that worked weren’t the flashiest.

They were the ones where the customer walked away thinking, “oh — this is easy now.”

The ones that struggled? We’d made the customer admire how clever we were.

Same tools. Opposite outcome.

So we changed one question.

Before we build anything now — an ad, an AI agent, a landing page — we ask one thing:

Does this make the customer feel smarter, or does it make us look smarter?

If the answer is us, we kill it.

It sounds small. It’s quietly changed everything about how we deliver.

Here’s what I’d leave you with this week:

Pull up your last piece of marketing.

Be honest — was it built to impress, or to make your customer feel capable?

One of those gets remembered. The other gets scrolled past.

Let’s win together,

Dez

Secret Agents AI

P.S. The strange thing about epiphanies is they’re almost never new information. That line wasn’t genius. I’d just been too busy being impressive to hear it. Maybe you have too.