In the latest episode of Playbook Broken, Nate St. Pierre told me, “The value of what I bring is approaching zero.”

But don’t worry about Nate, he’s not panicking. He’s selling his replacement.

Most consultants facing extinction would deny it’s happening. Nate built the thing making him obsolete, called it Youbots, and started selling it to small businesses for 10% of what they used to pay him.

Then he took Wednesdays off.

We get into a ton of stuff, including his journey into Hollywood, the future of AI and human creativity, ethical considerations, and tons more. It was a great hang and a great conversation.

The Self-Automation Paradox

In late 2023, Nate realized that 80% of his strategic marketing and development work could be automated. So he did what many would never consider: he sold access to his own replication.

He called them “NateBots.” Each bot trained on his processes, frameworks, and tone. Clients stopped hiring him and started hiring the productized version of him.

His first client dropped her $5,000-a-month agency two weeks later. “I just use bots now, and we do better work and more of it,” Nate said of what happened next.

That experience isn’t a testimonial. It’s a market correction and a mindset shift. It’s another playbook breaking and being rebuilt.

What Nate understands faster than most is that in a world where expertise can be encoded, ownership of the encoding becomes leverage.

The Wednesday Problem

What followed was a ton of learning and experimentation to get the platform dialed in and working right. The key? A contextually aware “layer” that helps businesses extract maximum value from Youbots without having to become prompt and AI experts.

And because Nate is the first one to rip up a playbook, they don’t work on Wednesdays. Four people, one AI platform, and they go offline midweek. Their slogan: Work Less, Live More.

It’s not a stunt. It’s the company’s thesis.

“For fifty years we’ve been told technology would make us more human,” Nate says. “It’s been the opposite. We’re expected to do more with less time.”

While most AI firms optimize for throughput, Youbots optimizes for absence. The deliberate creation of white space. Nate spends Wednesdays building a retro text RPG, using AI for the code so he can focus on story. It’s a small example of a larger shift: use machines to recover meaning, not just efficiency.

But the open question remains: where does that line stop? When does “outsourcing the boring parts” become “outsourcing the self”?

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What Agencies Are Missing

Youbots doesn’t replace tasks. It wraps AI around an organization’s context. That means even a junior hire can generate director-level strategy in hours.

Agencies still cling to the belief that consultative thinking can’t be replicated. Their clients are quietly disproving them.

“The value they bring needs to change quickly,” Nate says. “All that front-end value—not all of it, but a lot—is replaceable.”

Survivors won’t fight automation. They’ll wield it.

The ones that don’t will spend the next two years explaining to clients why their retainers keep shrinking.

The Next Curve

This is what AI brings: a new spin for us to fully understand and incorporate. We’ve built powerful AI tools to extend ourselves, and are now just waking up to realize some of the tools no longer need us to function.

What’s different this time is who holds the agency. Nate didn’t get replaced by AI; he licensed himself through it. To me, this is the essence of Playbook Broken, and it’s why whenever I talk with Nate, I feel energized, brave, and motivated to keep pushing forward.

There is an uncomfortable lesson hiding in front of our faces. The future of creative work won’t hinge on resisting automation. Instead, it’ll depend on who owns the IP of their own replication and knowledge, and who embraces and accelerates it fastest.

For Nate, selling his replacement wasn’t surrender. It is succession planning.

Full disclosure, I’ve been informally helping Nate with product positioning, demos, and more. If you are interested in learning more, reach out.

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Around the town, notes and musings:

* The Diplomat (Netflix) is back, and OMG, it’s so good. We binged it while visiting Colonial Williamsburg and Jamestown this weekend, which gave us time to consider how far we’ve come as a nation.

* I finished doing some Clay training as part of their “Cohort” program and learned a ton. It’s not a perfect platform, and it’s expensive, but it’s also wildly powerful and requires a new way of thinking.

* AI slop sucks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to have some fun with it, too. MQL’s are for winners!

* Leaving my role as CEO of Third Door Media has been agonizing but also exciting. It’s exactly like me to get to the top of the mountain and then look for something else to climb. I’m ramping up my consulting business and talking to some incredible people doing marvelous things. If you are interested in talking, reach out anytime.

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