The 5 AM Wake-Up Call

At 5 AM this morning, my phone lit up with notifications. ChatGPT was down. Canva wasn't loading. And I immediately thought about all the business owners solely relying on AI for their marketing.

No captions could be written. No graphics could be designed. No content could be created. Just frustrated entrepreneurs clicking that refresh button repeatedly on their browsers, waiting for the internet to fix itself.

I've been in marketing long enough to see this coming. And honestly? This morning's shutdown reminded me exactly why I left the corporate world and started Wavespace Marketing.

What This Morning Really Exposed

Around 5 AM, a major Cloudflare outage took down ChatGPT, Canva, and numerous other business-critical tools. By my 7 AM morning meeting, services were coming back online. But the damage was done: the illusion that AI tools alone could run your marketing.

For businesses that had outsourced their entire marketing strategy to algorithms, this was a complete operational shutdown.

I learned marketing the old-school way: textbooks, hands-on experience, and tools that didn't require AI to function. During my corporate years, I watched technology and AI evolve rapidly. It became a complete dependence.

Everyone around me was using AI for everything. Writing copy? ChatGPT. Designing graphics? Canva's AI. Strategy? Let's ask the algorithm. And slowly, I noticed something troubling: people were losing the ability to think strategically about marketing. They could prompt an AI, but they couldn't explain why certain messaging worked or how to adapt when their tools failed them.

Over the past 18 months, I've watched countless small businesses make the same decision: replace human marketers with AI tools. The math seems compelling: why pay a marketing manager $50,000+ annually when ChatGPT costs $20/month?

The promise looked like this:

• ChatGPT writes your social captions, blog posts, and email campaigns

• Canva designs your graphics with AI-powered templates

• Automation tools schedule everything

• Total cost: Under $100/month

• Human expertise required: None

This morning's reality check looked like this:

• ChatGPT: Down

• Canva: Down

• Your content calendar: Empty

• Your marketing output: Zero

• Your backup plan: Non-existent

And here's what concerns me: this was only a few hours. What happens during a day-long outage? A week? What happens when a platform shuts down permanently or changes its pricing model overnight?

When your marketing manager is actually a subscription service, what happens when that service goes back to the ER? I'll tell you what happens: your business goes silent. Your competitors who maintained human expertise? They will keep moving. 

My Honest Take on AI in Marketing

Let me be clear about where I stand: I'm not anti-AI. That would be foolish and counterproductive. AI has transformed how quickly we can execute marketing tasks, and I'm grateful for that efficiency.

But I am strongly opposed to businesses treating AI as a replacement for marketing expertise rather than an enhancement of it.

Why This Morning Validated My Decision to Start Wavespace

Watching this outage unfold felt like watching something I predicted finally happen. This is exactly why I left comfortable corporate positions to build Wavespace Marketing.

In the corporate world, I saw the trend toward complete AI dependence accelerating.

Decision-makers were choosing efficiency over effectiveness, cost savings over strategic capability. Short-term thinking was winning over long-term resilience.

I knew this approach was fundamentally flawed. I knew businesses would become vulnerable. And I knew there would be a growing need for marketers who understood both worlds, the classical fundamentals and the modern tools, and could bridge them intelligently.

My mission with Wavespace is to re-educate: to teach business owners that mastering marketing fundamentals creates the strongest foundation for success, and that AI should amplify human expertise, not replace it.

This morning proved that the mission is more relevant than ever.

I don't believe the future of marketing is human or AI. It's both, working together intelligently.

The most successful businesses will use AI to amplify human marketing expertise, not replace it. They'll gain efficiency without sacrificing strategic capability. They'll leverage automation while maintaining the ability to adapt and improvise.

This is the approach we take at Wavespace, and it's what I believe every business should adopt.

A Personal Invitation

If this morning's ChatGPT and Canva outage revealed vulnerabilities in your marketing operations, I want to talk with you. This morning was just a preview. We don't know when the next outage will happen or how long it will last.

Schedule a FREE discovery call where we'll have an honest conversation about building a resilient marketing strategy. Just a straightforward discussion about your current approach and what needs to change.

Because here's what I know for certain: your marketing is too important to your business growth to risk on platform reliability. And your marketing manager shouldn't need to be "online" to do their job effectively.

Get my FREE Call