AI Turned Me Into a Content Agency of One

As AI races ahead, we try to step back from the fray every once in a while. Each quarter, we gather for a "think week” to reflect on our work from the previous quarter and come up with new ideas that we can build to keep delivering an incredible experience for our readers. In the meantime, we’re re-republishing five pieces by Katie Parrot with insights on how AI is changing our professional lives. Yesterday we re-upped her piece on how using vibe coding tools inspired her to want to learn to write her own software. Today we're running her in-depth look at how she uses AI to amplify her skills as a content creator.—Kate Lee

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As a content strategist and writer, I don’t often stop to count just how much I produce—until I do, and the numbers make me question my grip on reality.

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in front of my computer, scoping out everything I would be developing for one of my freelance clients over the next month, when It suddenly occurred to me that I was on the hook for an unhinged amount of content:

1. 8 blog articles
2. 3 ebooks
3. 24 LinkedIn posts
4. 8 LinkedIn carousels
5. 24 X posts
6. 16 Instagram posts
7. 8 Instagram carousels
8. 16 Facebook group posts
9. 24 emails

In the past, when I was on staff at a marketing agency, I was considered fully booked when I was producing two articles per week. The work I just listed would be enough to give three or four writers at a small content marketing shop some healthy business for two to three months.

Instead, I produced it all myself. In about two weeks. With help from AI.

That’s right: I am using the tools that so many people—particularly creative professionals—worry are going to take our jobs to literally take somebody’s job.

I can’t help but think: Am I okay with this?

It’s one thing to hear about AI killing jobs in theory. It’s another thing to see it happening—and see your own fingerprints on the murder weapon. But I’m not just wrestling with guilt. I’m also grappling with what it means to work this way—with the power AI has given me to do more, faster, and at a scale that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Because the task at hand isn’t (just) keeping up—it’s deciding what kind of race I want to run. And that’s where things get interesting.

From tool to transformation

I didn’t start using AI to cut someone else out of the equation. Like so many of us, I started experimenting with these tools out of curiosity. Could they really make my job easier? Could they help me work faster or better?

I started small, asking ChatGPT to suggest titles for blog posts, summarize research, or generate rough outlines. And at first that’s all it was: a tool. Just another productivity hack in an industry that thrives on them.

Two-odd years into my AI journey, I have to admit: AI hasn’t just helped me produce content faster—it has fundamentally changed the scale of what I can do. The limits I used to bump up against—time, energy, capacity—are way lower. The small, tedious steps—reformatting drafts, pulling in relevant links, or tweaking phrasing for clarity—are more manageable, the mental load lighter, the cognitive cost of switching between tasks reduced. I can deliver more content in less time, with less effort.

But speed isn’t the only boon of my AI-powered workflows. I can also deliver higher quality work because I'm not mentally exhausted from the grunt work. I can focus on strategy, on understanding my clients' needs, on crafting unique angles and perspectives—all corners that, in a past life, I might have cut because I was racing against deadlines and drowning in deliverables. It’s become trite to say that AI frees you to focus on the human elements that truly matter…but AI has freed me to focus on the human elements that truly matter.

I’ve come to think about AI’s role in my work in six parts, which correspond to the six parts of my workflow:

1. As a “second brain”
2. As a thought partner
3. As a first draft factory
4. As a first set of “eyes”
5. As a content multiplier
6. As a product manager

(For those wondering, my exact stack is:

1. ChatGPT for planning and outlining
2. Claude for drafting
3. Lex for editing and refining
4. Spiral for content repurposing)

Let’s look at how it all comes together.

My workflow, but make it AI

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that if you try to use AI out of the box, you’re going to have a bad time. These tools are powerful, but they don’t come preloaded with the context that makes content good. If you want AI to produce work that aligns with your goals—whether it’s high-quality thought leadership, brand-aligned marketing, or something else—you have to feed it the right inputs first.

That means taking the time upfront to train AI on the specific elements that matter. For me, that’s resources like: