I Spent $9,000 on an AI Course. Here's What Happened.

#51 - This spring I spent $9,000 of my own money on a twelve week AI course, and the most valuable thing I walked out with won't cost you a dollar.

I'm going solo to share what actually changed across three months of building with AI as a fractional CMO. Why I was heading toward burnout in the first place, what the class paid back and how fast, the AI partner I built that gives me back five to ten hours a week, and the part that surprised me most: the hardest work had nothing to do with AI. It was making decisions, and then getting them out of my head and documented so my team could move without me.

If you use AI every day and still have the nagging feeling you're not doing enough with it, this one is for you.

In this episode:

• How consuming everything about AI and activating almost none of it created real overwhelm
• What made a $9,000 investment in myself worth it, and how I knew within three weeks
• Negotiating a 30% rate increase, and signing two new clients at 70% above my old rate
• Why I'm moving away from hourly pricing, and how to think about which IP is yours to carry from company to company
• Building Scout, my Momentum Maker AI partner, for a 15 person marketing team
• Why decision fatigue, not technical difficulty, is the real bottleneck in AI adoption
• The free thing you can do this week to start pulling yourself out of the day to day
• The tools that changed how I work: Wispr Flow, Granola, connectors, and HTML artifacts
• What I still haven't figured out, including a living marketing brain and going multiplayer with AI instead of single player

Mentioned in this episode:

• Automate to Accelerate by Callan Faulkner, The Uncommon Business
• My AI hackathon episode from Snowdonia, Wales
• My conversation with Liza Adams

Next week I'm breaking down exactly how I built Scout, in case you want to build your own.

I'm building a room for CMOs who are ambitious, who care about their growth, and who want to be AI fluent in a way that matters at our level. The waitlist is open at https://www.growthactivated.com/cmo-operating-system.

Come tell me what you're working on over on LinkedIn. I'm rooting for you.

Thanks for hanging out with us today!

Come build with us:
The CMO Operating System is a six-week live cohort where you build one connected foundation for how your function plans, decides, and reports, with AI partners running on top of it. The system is yours, and it goes with you wherever you go next. The founding cohort is small and first by design. Enrollment closes September 30 and we start October 12. 

👉 Join the CMO OS waitlist 

Come say hi on LinkedIn: Mandy Hornaday
Visit us: growthactivated.com

Keep activating growth for yourself and your company. 💪