Have you ever watched Silicon Valley? It is one of my favorite shows that I do find myself revisiting every couple of years. The secondhand cringe watching these characters fumble their way through building a startup is just wonderful.

The intro for the show includes animations that evolve each season showing real brands come along, grow, and then fade away in a quick time lapse. The era we're currently living in with AI, the speed of these changes is no longer a time lapse, it's real time!

The changes are big and they are happening fast.

It seems like every week there are upgrades, new tools, approaches that could literally re-define how we work. We've seen, at almost every level, people hitting the "ngmi" (not gonna make it) mantra and the existential fear associated with it.

Don't get me wrong, we need to pursue, investigate, and implement AI today. It is a powerful tool and the applications are almost limitless to help us become more effective and efficient in all that we do. We are only limited by our creativity. The problem is, with all the rapid change, we can be easily tempted into crippling ourselves with opportunity. There is so much we could pursue but how much should we pursue? And, once we start pursuing, we can't abandon it for the newest tech that releases each week.

The fundamentals are still the same

AI is a tool that completely upends how we work. But, fundamentally, the what that we're working on is essentially the same. There are some silver bullets out there, but your business, organization, career wasn't built on silver bullets, hasn't been sustained by silver bullets, and won't be made or broken by whether or not you choose the right silver bullet in this rapidly changing world.

Focus on the fundamentals of your business! You have a product/service you're selling to your target audience. You have a message that you need to deliver to the right people at the right time. You want to deliver that product in the fastest, most efficient way possible with the best possible customer service.

Deciding which tools to use should be centered around helping you perform these fundamentals better, not on chasing the shiniest new toy.

What does that mean for us and your website?

There are so many new, shiny tools for us to use! And to be honest, I do enjoy playing with them. But, the fundamentals of a good website and a good web strategy are still the same. Do we implement tools and processes that help us to perform those fundamentals better? Yep! Do you need to completely upend your tech stack to use the latest and greatest? Nope!

One of the greatest benefits of the many frameworks that we have available to us, is that you can start to embrace new technologies without completely upending what you're currently doing. Using WordPress and want to switch to a headless frontend so you can utilize more AI coding directly? Use WPGraphQl and a framework like Astro to take all of your existing content to a new frontend. Have an existing site but want to start building targeted landing pages using a dedicated AI platform? You could proxy the pages through your existing site and utilize both!

With all of the excitement and noise we see everyday, it can almost be overwhelming and crippling. Don't let it get the best of you. Remember: