20 Years of "This Changes Everything," and the One Thing That Hasn't

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Back when we still called it a revolution, there was a lot of education needed for this new thing called social media marketing. We of course organized the brown bag lunches and voluntary training meetings. And I sat down with colleagues at the agency, one at a time, and helped them sign up for Facebook.

Some of them were embarrassed they hadn't already. A few asserted it was just for kids. I walked them through it anyway, set up their profiles, and then did the thing that mattered most: I became their first friend.

More than a decade later, the platform started sending out those "celebrate your first friend" notifications. I heard from a handful of those same people. Turns out, I was still in that spot for them. Nobody remembers the platform onboarding flow. People remember who sat with them when it was new and a little scary.

I think about that a lot right now, because we're back in a moment where a lot of smart, capable people feel like the new kid at the social media party again. Except this time it's AI, and the stakes feel higher, and the embarrassment runs deeper. Nobody wants to admit they haven't tried ChatGPT yet, or that they don't really get what an agent does, or that they're quietly worried about what all of this means for their job.

The tools can explain themselves. What they can't do is sit next to someone and say "it's fine, I didn't get it either at first, let's just try something together."

That's not a tool's job. It's never been a tool's job. It's a relationship's job.

I see this play out in two ways right now, and the gap between them is widening.

One way is the AI-as-lecture approach. Leadership announces a transformation initiative. Everyone gets an Outlook message about "embracing the future." Maybe there's a mandatory training on the calendar. And the people on the team who are anxious about it stay anxious, just more quietly now, because a chatbot may sound like a person, but it is indeed not a person.

The other way is what I'd call the "first friend" approach. Someone on the team who's already played with the tools sits down with the person who hasn't, not to demo anything impressive, but to say "here's what I tried, here's what was weird, here's what actually saved me time, want to try it together?" No deck! Just opening a window into how things work.

I've watched this second approach work, over and over, for decades of "this changes everything" moments. Digital. Facebook. Twitter. The iPhone. TikTok. Now AI. The tech changes, but the need for someone to make it feel less scary doesn't.

Trust is the actual infrastructure. We know from the foundations of change management that an org chart and tool stack doesn’t move the needle if people don't trust the person showing them how to use it. And trust isn't something you can prompt your way into. It's built one person at a time, usually slowly, through small moments that don't feel strategic at all.

That's the part of marketing and communications that's never been replaceable, and it's the part that matters most right now. Not because AI can't write a good caption (it can) or build a decent deck (it can do that too). But because the actual work of marketing has always been about reading a room, knowing who's scared and why, and showing up as the person who makes the unfamiliar feel a little more familiar.

The next great big adoption moment is already here, and a lot of people still haven't opened the prompt window. Some of that is real hesitation, the kind I'm talking about above. Some of it is just resistance dressed up as a take or a convenient slow-down, as if waiting it out were the same as being ready when it matters.

The tools themselves will teach you if you let them, that's the strange thing about this moment compared to 2010. You don't need someone to sit down next to you to learn ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. You need someone to sit down next to you to want to.

If you're a curious, strategic thinker, this is your moment to shine. Lean in, try things, break a few, and then become the person who shows someone else. That's how the next decade of marketing careers gets built, not by waiting for permission, but by being the one who already opened the window.

So here's my offer, and it's the same one I made over Facebook profile setups in 2007. I'm not going anywhere. If you're the person who's been quietly putting this off, embarrassed to ask, I'll be your first AI friend too. But I'm not going to pretend the tool is the hard part. It never was.

See you on the internet.

-Greg Swan, Head of Futures & Client Transformation, FINN Partners