by Jon Leland, AI Creative Director & Content Strategist

The Connection Engine

AI is the engine. Relationships are the point. A weekly look at how experts with something worth saying actually get heard. Join 1,300+ readers. ⚡

🎯 I'm Jon Leland, AI Creative Director at ComBridges, with four decades of communications craft behind me. Every week I show the work: the tools, the judgment calls, and the systems behind amplifying a message that deserves an audience. It's for purpose-driven experts, authors, coaches, and business owners who'd rather spend their time on their work than on their marketing. Use AI well. Stay human. Build what matters.

A hand picks one card showing a lightbulb from a grid of twenty rough sketch cards. Headline: "20 ideas. Which one is good?"

MUST READ

2 DAYS AGO • 3 MIN READ

🎯 What AI Still Cannot Do for Your Marketing

In this issue → The 20 subject lines AI generated for this email, and why most of them fail → Ann Handley’s name for the skill that no prompt library teaches → Why more options from AI make your discernment more valuable, not less “ "AI literacy is not prompt literacy. It's judgment literacy." — Ann Handley, bestselling author of Everybody Writes I asked Claude for twenty subject lines for this email. Nineteen of them were wrong. Here are five of them, so you can see what I mean: Unlock the...

Read Now

Two-panel diagram, "From False Binary to Collaborative Reality." The top panel opposes Human-Made and AI-Made. The bottom panel joins them with a bridge, meeting at Human + AI Collaboration, where human intention and judgment lead the process.

by Jon Leland, AI Creative Director & Content Strategist

The Connection Engine

🎯 What AI Still Cannot Do for Your Marketing

🎛️ Human-Made vs. AI-Made Is the Wrong Question

🧰 The people who get the most out of AI aren't tool hunting

🔍 You're using AI as a search engine. It's actually a workshop.

✨ Faster is the least interesting thing AI does for me.

🚫 No slop. Ever. Here's how that actually works.

🔁 I Connected Claude to Kit. Then the Feedback Loop Surprised Me.

🤖 AI read the data. I made the call. 📊

📬 A whole new world of email marketing just opened up

🤔 Why I retired a name I love in order to serve you better