Automation Dive: Marketing & Social Media

For over a decade, I searched for the “unicorn” tool: the platform, theme, or workflow that could do exactly what I needed without compromise. It never existed. Event pages expired. SEO value vanished. Rigid systems forced creative and marketing teams to work around their tools instead of with them.

This talk is about what happens when you stop searching for the perfect off-the-shelf solution and start building your own.

In this session, we’ll explore how to combine traditional automation and AI in a way that’s practical, scalable, and human-centered. You’ll learn how to identify high-impact pain points, design your own “unicorn features,” and prototype workflows that actually adapt as your needs evolve, without trying to automate everything at once.

We'll cover:

• Why most marketing and event workflows break down over time
• How to think big while starting small with automation
• Where traditional automation shines and where AI truly adds value
• How to use AI as an adaptable collaborator, not a fragile black box

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel. But if you care about flexibility, longevity, and creative control, you might want to be the one who designs the rims.

This is a practical, no-hype conversation about building systems that work the way you do, and finally letting go of the myth of the unicorn tool.