My Conversation with Ram: Why "I Am the Loop" Changed How I Work with AI
Over the past few weeks, my life has felt like a rollercoaster of activity, emotions, broken promises, and throwaway comments that have blossomed into massive developments. I am sure I will unpack all of that in a future post, but I really wanted to take this morning and share a wonderful conversation I had recently.
My Substack - Some Assembly Required - has always been where I work things out in public. It’s where the ideas are longest, sharpest, and least edited for palatability.
If you want to stay connected to where the thinking is going, not just the occasional post that survives the algorithm, please subscribe.
“I am the loop, not the human in the loop.”
That distinction, from a filmmaker friend, Gabe Michael, who writes The Creative Possibility on Substack, reframed how I think about AI — and it became the anchor for a conversation I had with Ramanathan Vythilingam 🏠 on the NCMT (Nanyang Center for Marketing and Technology) podcast, out of Nanyang Business School.
We got into what four decades in design — Apple, Disney, Gojek, and now RockPaperScissors — teaches you about adopting new tools without losing your judgment. A few threads we pulled on: why AI’s bidirectionality (the “call and response”) makes it fundamentally different from every creative tool that came before it.
In this episode, we talk about:
Why I use AI to find better questions rather than answers
How a senior Coca-Cola leader’s one question — “how did you know to ask that?” — became the seed for my book, To Question Is to Answer.
Why I’d rather chase a hallucination than dismiss it, since most of the time it’s pointing at a human truth rather than a data error
Why observable truths beat performance data when you’re trying to understand where a market is actually headed
Why the real risk of AI isn’t replacing junior talent, it’s senior people forgetting that experience, curiosity, and taste are the actual superpower.
If you’re a marketer, creative, or just AI-curious and tired of the “will it take my job” framing, this one’s for you.
Spreading the gospel, I love it! Great work Chris.