Shiny Objects, Hard Priorities: How We Decide Which AI Breakthroughs Matter

Shiny Objects, Hard Priorities: How We Decide Which AI Breakthroughs Matter

“Speed and execution are solved; judgment isn’t.” — Felix Haas

When we sketched the very first Seekwhens prototype—the project that would pivot into Compelling—ChatGPT didn’t exist. “Large Language Model” was jargon, not dinner-party small talk, and AI progress felt incremental, almost polite.

Fast-forward eighteen months and the landscape looks like a toddler’s finger-painting: bright, chaotic, splashes of jaw-dropping models every quarter. As founders, operators, and makers, we face a new problem:

How do you stay relentlessly focused on value when every week brings a shiny object that might change the game?

The Judgment Framework We Use Internally

1. Money → Minutes → Magic

   • Money: Will this save or make revenue for customers?

   • Minutes: Will it delete workflow time without adding new chores?

   • Magic: Will it create a customer-delighting moment they can’t unsee?

2. Lowest-Cost Proof
   Spin up the laziest experiment possible. Ten lines of Python, a Zapier hack, a midnight prompt. If it moves the dial, we escalate; if not, next.

3. Explain or Toss
   If we can’t articulate why a breakthrough matters in two sentences that pass the “sales rep test” (would an AE get it while the coffee is brewing?), we park it in Notion purgatory.

Why Multimodal GenAI Wasn’t On Our Roadmap—Until Last Week

Compelling lives in the world of text-heavy B2B signals: funding rounds, hiring surges, regulatory filings. Images felt orthogonal. Multi-agent orchestration and data freshness? Mission-critical. Image generation? Novel, but not ROI-urgent.

Then OpenAI dropped GPT-4o. Two things changed overnight:

1. Native Multimodality
   No chain-of-tools gymnastics. Text-and-image I/O in a single endpoint.

2. Usable Out-of-the-Box Quality
   For the first time, we saw Midjourney-level aesthetics and controllable outputs without 50-prompt iterations.

Suddenly the TAM for “visual insight embeds”—think one-click persona cards inside a CRM, automatically branded deal overviews, and yes, playful team art—jumped from “niche” to “very possible.”

A 30-Minute Experiment: Ghibli-fying the Team

We fed our Slack profile photos plus a one-sentence prompt into GPT-4o. No manual in-painting, no Photoshop patch-ups. Out popped a Studio-Ghibli-style portrait of the Compelling crew that actually looked… cohesive. The tech finally crossed the Money → Minutes → Magic threshold:

• Money: Branded visuals customers can share with prospects = viral loop.

• Minutes: Zero design time.

• Magic: A Slack thread full of 🥹 emojis. (Internal delight counts.)

Does that mean Compelling is pivoting to AI art? Nope. But it does mean image outputs just graduated from “ignore” to “experimentation track” on our backlog. Expect to see richer, more human-readable intel cards soon.

The Takeaway for Go-To-Market Teams

• Hype isn’t the enemy—lack of judgment is.

• Curiosity is cheap; shipping the wrong thing is expensive.

• Taste still wins. AI can churn out infinite versions; choosing the one that compounds value is on us.

So yes, in between building transparent lead rankings and self-cleaning CRM pipelines, we Ghibli-fied ourselves. Not because we were bored, but because every breakthrough deserves a brutally fast, judgment-heavy probe. Most get filed away. A few spark something bigger.

That’s the Compelling way: focused where it matters, playful where it doesn’t hurt, always searching for the tech that turns minutes into magic.

P.S. If you want to join the Ghibli portrait and by that join a team that stress-tests AI toys at 2 a.m.—we’re hiring.