The model isn’t the bottleneck. The process is. Every team has a Derek with a spreadsheet that has more tabs than the actual campaign plan. The fix isn’t picking the right model — it’s building a workflow where model choice is a 10-minute decision, not a 3-week project.
The Messy Middle is a daily comic strip about a New York marketing team navigating the chaos of AI adoption. New strips every week.
What is the Messy Middle? It’s that awkward phase between “we should use AI” and “we actually use AI well.” The part nobody talks about at conferences. The part where tools don’t integrate, prompts don’t work, and the intern somehow figures it out first.