Aggressively Human: Online Business in the Age of AI, Algorithms & Automations

Trust is the New Currency: A Craft+Commerce conference debrief

Jul 24, 2025

Dive into insights from a recent creator conference, where in-person connections outshine keynotes. Discover the challenges of AI content and explore the importance of raw, imperfect storytelling. Learn about practical AI strategies, including the 'use and refuse' approach, and the significance of maintaining relationships for long-term success. Get reminded that what seems like overnight success is often the result of years of effort and engineered luck. Perfect for creatives looking to thrive in an AI-driven world!

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ANECDOTE

Value Of Pre-Con And Hallway Chats

Jessica describes attending her eighth creator conference and spending extra days in a curated small-group Lab Offline before Craft & Commerce.
She emphasizes that the real value came from hallway and post-session conversations, not keynote novelty.

INSIGHT

Debriefing Beats Keynote Novelty

Keynotes often recycle available content and are less novel for seasoned attendees.
True conference value is peer debrief: sharing how attendees apply known tactics in their businesses.

ANECDOTE

Lunch Line Networking Win

Jessica met author Pam Slim by intentionally joining the same lunch line and struck up a conversation.
That casual meetup led to a LinkedIn connection and potential future support for Jessica's book.

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Jessica goes to conferences a lot, especially more now that she’s not employed full time. This is her eighth creator conference (4 World Domination Summits, 2 Craft and Commerces, 1 Neurodiversion summit, The Lab Offline, and a number of small mastermind and coaching retreats).

So today’s episode is both a debrief on going to conferences and also a recap of the 4 takeaways from Craft and Commerce that are informing our year ahead.

We dig into conferences:

* Why putting yourself in the position to meet people can help you meet your internet heroes… and can also help you sell more things. (Shoutout to former guest Jeremy Enns here).

* How does one maintain relationships with people so that the next years of the conference just get better and better?

* Why presentation-heavy conferences miss the point, especially for more seasoned attendees (and how to think about the composition of the audience).

And then, we dig into the four takeaways from the conference itself.

* We’re entering into an AI content doom loop.

* What’s your “use and refuse” AI strategy?.

* Storytelling reigns supreme.

* There is no “overnight success”.

“If they don't exist, they will in the next six months is a tool that if you list a number of the influencers you wanna follow and comment on their post… and so you just feed it into an AI tool and that AI tool will come up with an AI generated comment. So you don't even have to log into LinkedIn. If this doesn't exist, I guarantee it will in like the next six months. You wouldn't even have to log in to see what your favorite influencer posted and the AI comments on their stuff so that your stuff feeds goes into the feed.

And, some AI tool is gonna go into your library of content that you've created already, and it's gonna snip out something, drop it on LinkedIn, some other bot is gonna comment on it, and then there's no human involved in some of that stuff, period.” - Jessica

Mentioned Resources

Pamela Slim

Jeremy Enns’s Content Strategy Schematic

Neurodiversion Conference

She’s so Lucky with Les Alfred

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Meg Casebolt

Jessica Lackey

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