On episode 237 of The Artificial Intelligence Show, published September 8, Paul Roetzer — founder of SmarterX and the Marketing AI Institute — said of OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra: “This is the first model release where my first reaction was dread over excitement.” His reason was the marketing. OpenAI’s opening line, he noted, was that “anything you can do on a computer Astra can do for you fast,” which is a claim about replacing computer-based work, not assisting it.
His second point was about who moves first. “I can do the work of a hundred people with just running seven agents all day long,” he said of the AI-native startups he expects to move first, while established organizations are still absorbing the assistants of two years ago.
He then applied the same logic to his own former trade. Asked about Wall Street banks pressing law firms for AI savings, Roetzer, who once owned an agency, said: “If we were hiring a marketing agency… there’s no way. It’s like a tenth of the time it used to take.” Service firms that bill by the hour, he predicted, face the same pressure lawyers do.
For the valley: a tenth of the time is one former agency owner’s estimate of agency work, and the valley’s agencies sell the same hours he once did.