Original · Unique Research · 2025-12-09
Historical edition: This is the complete English translation of Unique Research's December 9, 2025 article, including all original analysis and the published conversation. The nine-figure annual-revenue claim in the title comes from Little Q's account of unnamed creator teams; it is not an audited result or a claim that Leapo Tech earned nine figures. The original specifies no currency for that claim, Leapo Tech's several-million revenue, the claimed consulting-cost savings, the 100-million-plus client revenue, or the two-million impersonation anecdote; no currency has been inferred here. Revenue, efficiency, staffing, client relationships, platform-policy descriptions and anecdotes remain attributed to the original author and speakers, not independently verified current facts. This historical report describes automated-comment marketing and counseling-related examples; it does not establish their effectiveness, platform permission or clinical suitability.
Source-wording note: “Liu Run” is explicitly a pseudonym in the source and must not be read as identifying the real person of that name. “Canvas” is retained as written; the source does not identify a specific product more precisely. The TikTok/Xiaohongshu example is dated February by the speaker and is preserved as her chronology, not independently confirmed. The analysis says “more than thirty orders,” while the transcript says “30 orders” and uses the ambiguous phrase “half of the average order value” (一半的客单价); that wording does not establish an exact share of orders or revenue. The original's relative dates, numerical performance comparisons and future predictions remain historical speaker claims.
Image context: All five original images are a group photograph and speaker portraits, not charts or additional case evidence. The stage identifies a “Super-Individual Workshop” titled “AI-Powered Marketing Growth: How Super Individuals Break Through in Marketing,” with Unique Research × Yilun AI (易论AI; transliteration) branding and UniqueBloom (非凡大赏) event branding. Speaker identities and roles shown onstage are retained in the text. The ordinary photographs are not reproduced; no image-only substantive data is omitted.
The four people onstage at this small discussion, which the organizer called the "marketing session," came from very different backgrounds:
Xiaohongshu marketing expert Wang Mengke; Wang Man, or Abby, who has long led product commercialization; Little Q, a WeChat Channels expert and former Director of Tencent Live; and Manda, or Amanda, now co-founder of Leapo Tech after fighting growth battles at ByteDance and Xiaohongshu.
They discussed a question no marketer can avoid: AI has been flooding in for so long, but whom is it helping, and whom is it eliminating?
For the "super individuals" living through this change, the real breakthrough is not chasing a pile of new tools, but answering one question again—in the AI era, what exactly am I still worth?
I. AI Is Changing Not the Toolbar, but the Underlying Order
If Abby had to summarize AI's impact on every industry in one word, it would be "efficiency."
She spent the past fifteen years in the technology industry working on SaaS, hardware, and software products, including complex use cases such as autonomous driving. In the past, to teach algorithms to recognize every strange exception in the human world, teams had to send people onto roads to collect data and then manually label extreme situations: a pedestrian suddenly appearing, a strange obstacle, or an unusual change in lighting.
Now AI can automatically generate vast numbers of Corner Case scenarios and label them automatically, accelerating model training across the board. For automakers, the path from technical validation to commercial implementation has genuinely shortened. This is not an "intelligent upgrade" on a PPT; it is faster cash flow.
In marketing, the changes Manda sees are more "microscopic" and more brutal.
AI has broken apart and reassembled many basic steps—writing copy, revising titles, designing posters, editing videos, and more. At least half of repetitive work can be handed to models. On the surface, the entry barrier has fallen: "people who do not really understand marketing can also do marketing."
Yet as the barrier fell, the overall "water level" rose.
When everyone can generate content rapidly, the competition is no longer about who can make a poster more polished, but who can offer clearer judgment and a more rigorous methodology amid a sea of templated content. For people without insight, AI amplifies confusion; for people with insight, AI amplifies potential energy.
Little Q takes a more practical view.
His opening line was, "The biggest change AI brought is that—I lost my job." The audience laughed, but beneath the joke lay real anxiety: after fourteen years in Tencent's livestreaming business, he now sees AI taking over a large share of content production. In a sense, "many people genuinely no longer need to work as they did before."
He offered an example.
For a period, the celebrity in China most aggressively "cloned" by AI was neither Andy Lau nor a top film star, but "Jin Dong, who had never opened an account." Because Jin Dong did not livestream or make short videos, numerous impersonator accounts used AI-synthesized voices to say in videos, "I am filming in Hengdian and am still short 2 million (currency unspecified in the source) for working capital." Quite a few older women really took trains to deliver money, and the incidents were later exposed in news reports.
The changes AI brings to an industry have never been limited to "efficiency." They also include gray areas, ethical risks, and even large-scale ruptures of trust.
Platforms are also adjusting the order.
On Xiaohongshu, Wang Mengke saw a wave of account matrices with a heavy "AI flavor" rapidly launching and occupying niches with mass-generated content. As new rules arrived, however, Xiaohongshu strengthened real-name authentication and facial recognition. Its attitude toward "mass-produced content" lacking a genuine human entity was clear: tighten control.
Tools upgrade; the order is rewritten.
AI does not simply add "another menu row"; it rewrites the existing rules of the game.
II. When AI Becomes a "Super Assistant," the Ceiling for Small Teams Is Redrawn
If AI changes processes within corporate systems, then for individuals and small teams it changes the "ceiling."
Abby's daily work can now be summarized in one sentence: I work alongside a "super assistant."
When creating training courses, she previously spent a great deal of time formatting and beautifying PPT slides. Now she only needs to give the structure and logic to AI, let it produce a "usable first draft," and then make minor adjustments herself. For public speeches or interviews, she can give the recording to a model and generate a promotional draft ready for use within one minute.
For industry analysis, she previously had to read dozens of research reports and then write a summary by hand. Now she can give all the reports to AI and ask it to synthesize and abstract from those materials, reserving her limited energy for "judgment" and "tradeoffs." Even in personal finance and investing, she first asks AI to organize a target company's financial reports and market views, then adds her own judgment to make a decision.
For her, AI has evolved from a "tool" into a "generalist secretary."
Little Q sees the restructuring of the entire content-team model.
He has served several leading knowledge IP creators and found that many teams now have only 3—5 people, yet generate higher annual revenue than large companies.
One teacher—he used Liu Run as a pseudonym—made a change this year: reducing the office from 1,000 square meters to 400 square meters. The reason was simple—many business lines were growing well, but no longer required so many people. His WeChat Official Account and WeChat Channels content is basically not operated by him personally; employees work with AI to complete it. Even a substantial share of the voice in his videos is AI-generated.
He made a highly "counterintuitive" statement: "The moment I look at the content, responsibility and authority return to me."
He therefore deliberately does not look. He gives judgment authority to the team and the data, keeping his own time only for truly important clients and critical projects.
Manda's entrepreneurial experience explains the "extreme amplification of small teams" even more clearly.
When she worked on growth at ByteDance and Xiaohongshu, a central platform team usually started with 20 or 30 people;
After she founded Leapo Tech, however, the core team began with only 4 people and grew to just 5 after one year, yet already generated several million in revenue (currency unspecified in the source) and served clients including ByteDance, Tencent, and a group of AI Native tools.
How was that possible?
They did not "use AI for the sake of using AI." They carefully embedded AI into every stage of the workflow. For market analysis, models rapidly extracted the cultures, consumption habits, and social-media ecosystems of different countries, eliminating substantial consulting costs;
For content testing, AI automatically generated multiple versions of messaging for an A/B Test, letting the data speak rather than arguing from intuition;
For creator partnerships, tools identified precisely matched influencers and shortened a business cycle that previously took several weeks or even one month to less than one week, raising per-person efficiency to 3 or 4 times that of a traditional advertising agency.
Only when AI becomes a "super assistant" does a small team gain, for the first time, the possibility of using very few people to move a market that once required a large organization.
III. In the AI Era, "Super Individuals" Depend Not on Tools but on Judgment
When the topic shifted from "how to use tools" to "what people should become," the discussion grew noticeably denser.
Manda ranked the qualities of a "super individual" in this order:
Judgment and insight come first, execution speed second, and skill with tools only third.
More tools appear every day. Without judgment, people are dragged around by them: trying an AI copywriter today, an AI editor tomorrow, and being brainwashed by a "fully automated growth system" the day after that.
The real key is this: do you know exactly what problem you are trying to solve? Can you distinguish false demand from false efficiency?
Execution speed is the second moat.
Technology changes too quickly in the AI era for "preparing a masterstroke in secret" to remain appropriate. Manda shared a small personal story: she had almost no time to prepare for this discussion because she worked late last night. Today, she spent twenty minutes in a taxi using AI to connect her previous content and style, rapidly generate a structure, and then speak naturally from that structure at the venue.
The ability to rapidly combine personal experience, AI capabilities, and the immediate context is fundamentally the ability to "make a reasonably good choice within limited time."
Little Q begins with the word "gaps."
After teaching at Tencent for many years, he identified four "gaps" that determine an individual's ceiling—the information gap, insight gap, execution gap, and resource gap.
The information gap makes money fastest and disappears fastest. Last year some people earned money from the popularity of "a viral foundation model," but once similar domestic products spread and domestic substitution accelerated, the business of profiting from a "wrapper" vanished immediately.
The insight gap determines whether you can survive after the tide recedes: can you understand what long-term value you actually provide, rather than selling a one-time sense of "novelty"?
The execution gap is brutal. Many familiar leading influencers, hosts, and writers appear to do things "effortlessly," but in reality they can livestream alone for 12 hours straight or write until 3 a.m. Going live is not like "going to a funeral" for them; it is routine.
The resource gap is the final threshold: can you combine the tools, relationships, and supply chains in your hands into a difficult-to-copy coordinated attack?
Abby summarizes the "super individual" as a pyramid.
At the base are passion and curiosity. When facing AI, the first reaction is neither fear nor resistance, but "can I use it to make something more interesting?"
In the middle is a vocation rather than a job. A job exchanges work for cash flow; a vocation realizes the self. After leaving an organization, you must face the market's cold hardness directly and relearn business logic. AI is only one brick in that process.
At the top is the ability to "make money generate money."
When you have passive income independent of a single employer, you appear much more relaxed at work: you do not need to please people excessively or study a superior's expression every day, and you have more courage to say "no" to poor opportunities.
Her final statement was: "A super individual is not 'one person doing the work of ten,' but 'one person earning the right to decide the structure of their own life.'"
IV. Several Real Cases: How AI Turns the "Impossible" into Routine Operations
Manda described a "blitz" she carried out during her entrepreneurial journey.
In February this year, TikTok faced the risk of being banned in the United States, and many creators began searching for new content platforms. She quickly recognized a window of opportunity for Xiaohongshu.
She and her team then did several things:
First, they created r/rednote, a Reddit community dedicated to discussing Xiaohongshu, and used AI to write and publish a complete "Guide to Using Xiaohongshu." It attracted more than 1,000 creators in three days and accumulated 4,000 members in one month;
Next, they worked closely with Xiaohongshu's official team to establish an MCN, signed overseas creators, and used automated workflows and AI to help those creators transfer, translate, edit, and publish content so it could find a new audience in China;
From sensing the shift to establishing the platform, building the workflow, and implementing the MCN, the core team consisted of only a few people and completed the entire process in less than one month.
Without AI, that pace would have been nearly impossible.
The second story came from a founder with a technical background.
He built a workflow product similar to Canvas. The technology was good, but he knew nothing about marketing. One month after launch, the product had attracted virtually no attention.
After Manda's team became involved, it first used AI to conduct a systematic comparison and simulation of competitors and the market, repositioning the product and defining its target as North American users with a high willingness to pay;
The team then used tools to contact ten specialized bloggers on Twitter and YouTube and secure partnerships within one week, compressing work that once took one month into seven days;
It then used AI to remix the creators' content, redistribute it, and optimize SEO. As a result, in the first week of promotion during the second month, the product gained its first 100 seed users.
Little Q's story sounds more "everyday."
He ran a sale to his existing audience for one of his courses and asked a friend to build an RPA tool that used AI to "help him scroll through WeChat Moments."
The tool automatically scanned Moments posts, recognized the text and images, and commented in his tone.
If you posted a selfie, it might politely remain silent;
But if you posted something related to work or personal growth, it would naturally respond: "That is an excellent point. I have recently been studying a similar topic, and I happen to have a course that covers it..."
This was not crude mass advertising; it used a reasonably natural approach to connect the discussion to his course.
The sale ultimately generated more than thirty orders. Half began with automated "interest planting" on Moments, followed by human communication to close the sale.
Abby mentioned a technology company she serves that cut more than 70% of its marketing team over two years.
Revenue was barely affected. One person could use AI to execute the entire chain from demand analysis, creative generation, video editing, and poster design to materials for offline events. The reason was not that the person was "especially skilled with tools," but that:
He knew the entire business process well enough to draw it with his eyes closed, and understood how each step could be broken down and connected;
He could integrate resources inside and outside the company, combining people, tools, and channels into a network;
Most importantly, he had a strategic perspective and understood his role in the overall operation—which decisions required his personal judgment, and which tasks could be released to AI and outsourcing.
AI quietly turns these "rather unlikely" combinations into the new everyday reality.
V. Do Not Treat AI as a "God": Boundaries, Misconceptions, and Calm Judgment
The discussion also included several stories of "lessons learned" that reminded us:
AI is powerful, but it is not omnipotent and never comes without a cost.
Little Q mentioned the psychological-counseling industry.
One team wanted to use AI to "replicate" a leading psychological counselor so that a model could answer users' psychological questions instead of the real person. Technically, today's models can indeed provide answers that appear gentle and empathetic, and may even "speak more skillfully" in text.
In his view, however, that crosses an ethical boundary. People seeking help arrive with real suffering. If there is no professional human judgment behind the response and everything is generated automatically by a model, even an advanced algorithm is merely "coldly imitating warmth."
This is a gray area that cannot be measured with KPIs. The trend is irreversible, but the human boundary of trust should not retreat casually for the sake of technical convenience.
Manda had just returned from TechCrunch in Silicon Valley. Her direct impression was:
In the world's most technologically advanced region, people instead attach exceptional importance to offline connection and interpersonal trust. Everyone certainly uses AI, but no one believes that "AI can replace everything."
One danger she observed was that some founders wanted an "all-or-nothing" solution—
Either refusing AI entirely and insisting that everything remain "purely handmade";
Or imagining that AI could replace the entire marketing department and treating marketing as nothing more than a set of automatable processes.
The truly healthy state is to recognize AI's strengths while also recognizing what makes people irreplaceable: let machines run repetitive tasks at scale, and let people handle complex judgment, ethical decisions, and relationship management—the work requiring "sensitivity."
Abby warns of another common misconception: we generally overestimate AI's "ability to think."
Many business owners treat AI as an "answer machine," hoping they can feed it a vague question and receive the optimal solution. But if the enterprise has not completed even basic digitization and its data remain isolated, the result is "Garbage In, Premium Garbage Out"—garbage goes in, and only more polished, better-formatted garbage comes out.
AI can help you calculate, but it cannot set the overarching direction for you.
If you cannot even articulate "what I want," the most advanced tool merely helps you run faster down the wrong road.
VI. From "Being Seen" to "Being Remembered": Three Key Trends for the Coming Year
At the end of the discussion, Wang Mengke asked the three guests to summarize, "in one sentence," the AI-marketing trend they considered most important for the coming year.
Manda's answer was simple: the old challenge was "how to be seen"; the challenge now is "how to be remembered."
AI enables you to produce large volumes of content in a short time, but if that content lacks a consistent style and clear value proposition, it will quickly disappear into the flood of information. Brands and individuals need to ask: which part of me cannot be copied? Which way of expressing myself makes people recognize me at a glance?
Little Q focuses on the value of the "real person."
As digital humans and AI voiceovers grow increasingly realistic, large amounts of low-barrier voiceover content will be replaced. The short-video format of "standing and reading a script" will become extensively homogenized over the coming year.
By contrast, content forms that retain a strong personal imprint—writing on a board, in-depth discussions, live interviews, and heartfelt storytelling—will become scarcer. The value of a real person lies not in "how much they say," but in "who is speaking, where they are speaking, and the state they are in while speaking."
Abby believes the trend will move from "single-purpose tools" toward "agents integrated into workflows (agents)."
Individuals need not obsess over every new tool; they should learn to design their own workflows, assigning AI a different role in information gathering, content production, distribution optimization, and data review.
At the same time, she offers a reminder: beyond every discussion of efficiency, super individuals should pay even greater attention to their physical and mental state. The heart is the source of creation. Once understanding, empathy, aesthetic sensitivity, and curiosity about the world are exhausted, even the best model cannot restore them.
Wang Mengke added one final point: in content, AI can write like you, but it cannot write you. What truly needs to be cultivated is personal style.
AI Will Replace Many People, but Not "People Who Are Clear-Headed"
Returning to our original question: in an era when AI assists marketing growth, how can a super individual break through?
The contest is not over who knows more tools, but who sees more clearly: what exactly am I amplifying with AI?
If you treat AI merely as a "faster keyboard," it will eventually replace you;
If you treat AI as a "megaphone" that amplifies your judgment, style, and values, it can instead become a stepping stone toward freedom.
Perhaps for a long time to come, marketers' daily lives will oscillate between "being chased by tools" and "using tools to widen the gap."
But one thing will probably remain unchanged: what is truly valuable in this era is not how many models you have used or how many prompts you remember, but whether you have the courage, patience, and honesty to refine an answer of your own.
When everyone can speak with the help of AI,
What do you want to say?
And how much responsibility are you willing to bear for those words?
More Details from the Conversation
Opening Introductions
Wang Mengke: Hello, everyone. I am Wang Mengke. Let me briefly introduce the other speakers because some people may not know our guests.
Abby is a product-commercialization consultant who previously served as the business lead at a listed company. She has long focused on product growth and monetization and has extensive experience operating business models.
Little Q is a WeChat Channels expert and formerly served as Director of Tencent Live and a senior Tencent instructor. He now works as a marketing consultant for Tencent Advertising while also providing WeChat Channels training, consulting, and implementation coaching.
Manda is co-founder of the Leapo Tech global-marketing platform. She previously led marketing growth at TikTok and Xiaohongshu, has eight years of hands-on social-media marketing experience, and now focuses primarily on AI-empowered social-media marketing. Welcome, everyone; our small session is the "marketing session."
The Biggest Change AI Has Brought to the Industry
Wang Mengke: Let us get straight to the point. What is the biggest change AI has brought to your industry and vertical niche? Have there been highly tangible changes in familiar work situations? Abby, please begin.
Wang Man, Abby: I have spent the past 15 years in technology, working on software, SaaS, and hardware. The most profound change AI has brought me is efficiency.
I will use autonomous driving as an example. Before AI, we needed to gather road data and manually label Corner Case scenarios—long-tail or extreme situations—such as a pedestrian suddenly appearing or an unidentified obstacle. After AI emerged, it could automatically generate this data and automatically label these Corner Case scenarios. This made it easier to train our algorithmic models and helped autonomous-driving systems adapt better to the complexity of the real human world. From a commercialization perspective, it accelerated product deployment. One of my clients in Hangzhou is doing precisely this: its product generates data and provides related services to major automakers.
Little Q: The greatest impact is unemployment. Yes, I am a victim. I spent 14 years at Tencent, and suddenly AI arrived, allowing me to stop working and lie flat. Of course that is a joke, but it may reflect everyone's anxiety and consideration—AI really has made it unnecessary for many people to work.
Consider my livestreaming business. Guess which celebrity in China has been harmed most severely by AI—cloned at scale by AI, drained of social value, and left entirely unable to fight back?
It is not Andy Lau, who has legal protection; nor is it Wu Jing or Yang Mi. The answer is Jin Dong.
Jin Dong is famous and has a body of work, but he has no account, does not livestream, and does not make short videos. A pile of AI impersonators therefore mimic his voice and say, "Hello, I am in Hengdian and still need 2 million (currency unspecified in the source) in support." Many older women then take trains to send money and are exploited. This has appeared in the news. It is not a joke; it happens across the major platforms and is especially severe on WeChat Channels. This is one reality AI has produced.
Manda: Let me share experience from marketing. One obvious change is that AI can replace many workflows in marketing. At least 50% to 60% of tedious, repetitive steps can be replaced, and the efficiency improvement is beyond dispute.
Yet the greatest change I have observed is that the cognitive threshold in marketing has risen. AI lowered the basic entry barrier, making it seem that people without professional knowledge can do marketing, but that raised the overall "water level"—extracting better methodology from AI assistance and developing clearer insight became more difficult. This will force genuine marketing experts to emerge while eliminating those merely fishing in muddy waters.
Wang Mengke: In a sense, the tide is receding and revealing who has been swimming naked.
Manda: Exactly. The industry's base has become broader, but the requirements for professional competence have risen.
Wang Mengke: Let me also share something from the Xiaohongshu field. Because of AI, many methods for launching accounts in batches through content production appeared this year, and you may have seen accounts with a strong "AI flavor." Recently, however, new rules tightened. Xiaohongshu now requires real-name authentication and facial recognition, which has to some extent curbed the flood of homogenized account matrices.
How AI Helps Small Teams and Individuals Improve Efficiency
Wang Mengke: Next question: how does AI help small teams or individuals improve marketing efficiency? Are there representative stages or situations?
Wang Man, Abby: In my own case, AI is my "super assistant."
First is content. In the past, when preparing training, I spent a great deal of time beautifying PPT slides. Now I simply enter the logic and structure into AI, and it automatically generates a first draft, saving large amounts of beautification time and letting me focus on the course content itself. For a public speech or interview, I give the recording to AI and it generates promotional copy within one minute.
Second is industry analysis. In the past, I might have needed to read dozens of research reports. Now I give them to AI and have it produce deep analysis and a summary based on those reports.
Third is personal finance and investing. I give the target to AI and ask it to combine financial reports and market views to assist my judgment. Across my entire field of work, it serves as an all-purpose assistant.
Little Q: I have had the privilege of serving several leading creators in the AI field. Today's leading teams generally have no more than 5 people, yet their annual revenue reaches 9 figures.
For example, Mr. Liu Run—a pseudonym—made a major change this year, reducing his office from 1000 square meters to 400 square meters. He found that even as the rest of the business grew strongly, it no longer needed so many people.
Here is one detail: Mr. Liu does not look at his own WeChat Official Account or WeChat Channels. AI and employees produce everything. He said something wise: "The moment I look, responsibility and authority transfer to me." If he does not look, employees and AI make the judgments. Much of the voice in his videos is also produced entirely with AI and sounds highly realistic. This means he can devote all his time to more important customers rather than consuming it in content production.
Manda: I previously worked on growth at ByteDance and Xiaohongshu, where one central platform team generally needed about 20 to 30 people. But in my startup Leapo Tech, the core team began with only 4 people and has grown to 5 after one year. Yet the business already generates several million in revenue (currency unspecified in the source), serving ByteDance, Tencent, and many AI Native tools.
The greatest difference is that we use AI intelligently throughout every stage:
Market analysis: expanding overseas requires understanding local cultures and customs in different countries such as the United States and Southeast Asia. This previously required long experience living there or expensive consulting fees. Now we use AI to retrieve databases and online information, rapidly generate strategies, and save many tens of millions in annual consulting fees (currency unspecified in the source).
Content testing: we connect workflows with AI to run an A/B Test, compare different content assets and messaging, and rapidly identify breakout performers.
Creator partnerships: identifying influencers and negotiating partnerships once took several weeks or even one month. With tools, we can now find the most precisely matched creators in one day and implement a partnership within one week. Overall per-person efficiency is 3 to 4 times that of a traditional advertising agency.
What Capabilities Do Super Individuals Need?
Wang Mengke: In the AI era, what capabilities does a super individual need?
Manda: I rank judgment and insight first, the speed and efficiency of execution second, and skill with tools only last.
Judgment: AI is a mirror reflecting the human mind. With so many tools, everyone feels anxious, but the most important ability is judging which tool is useful and which tool fits each situation.
Execution—speed: technology changes too quickly in the AI era, and speed is the only moat. You cannot prepare a masterstroke in secret; you must respond rapidly.
Resource integration: take today's interview. I worked late last night and had no time to prepare. Today I spent 20 minutes in a taxi connecting workflows and used AI to generate answers in my style. That demonstrates the ability to rapidly integrate personal assets.
Little Q: I taught at Tencent for a long time. Let me share four levels of "gaps":
Information gap: money from an information gap is earned fastest, but if information is all you have—some people profited by selling around DeepSeek when it went viral, for example—and you accumulate nothing, the gap will soon close.
Insight gap: how can you turn something into enduring profit? Last year many people sold wrappers around overseas AI products in China. This year, domestic products such as Kimi and Zhipu iterated rapidly, and the wrapper business disappeared. When the insight gap no longer exists, you must change direction quickly.
Execution gap: the leading creators I have seen, including Fan Deng and Feng Tang as well as many I cannot name, are all extremely diligent. One host, for example, can livestream solo for 12 hours. This requires not only physical stamina but mental strength. Many people feel that "going live is like going to a funeral"; the execution gap determines why you can succeed when others cannot.
Resource gap: this is a relatively important barrier. One of my clients, for example, saw an opportunity at CES in Chinese hardware expanding globally. Combining Shenzhen Huaqiangbei's low-cost supply chain with an AI concept, the client sold extremely well overseas. A company such as UBTECH used a small team of 5 people to test the entire process of taking an AI toy from Demo to market in two and a half months.
Wang Man, Abby: The core of a "super individual," as I understand it, is freedom—breaking free of organizational constraints and becoming the CEO of your own life. This can be viewed as a pyramid model:
Base: passion and curiosity. Face AI with curiosity rather than fear, and remain positive and optimistic.
Body: build your own vocation. Unlike a job, which earns cash flow, a vocation realizes the self. After leaving an organization, you must confront the market's brutality directly and develop commercial thinking.
Apex: the ability to make money generate money. Achieve freedom through passive income. Even while employed, this ability means you need not fear layoffs or spend energy managing upward, and can face life with greater ease.
Real-World Cases: AI Makes the Impossible Possible
Wang Mengke: Share a real case you have encountered and explain how AI allowed an individual or small team to do something previously impossible.
Manda: I will give two examples.
The first is our own. In February, TikTok faced the risk of being banned in the United States, and many creators flocked to Xiaohongshu. We quickly judged that this was a traffic opportunity.
Build the platform: we established a Xiaohongshu community on Reddit and used AI to generate a "Guide to Using Xiaohongshu." It attracted more than 1000 creators within three days and 4000 within one month.
Redirect traffic: to bring this creator traffic into China, we worked with Xiaohongshu's official team and established our own MCN. Using automated workflows and AI tools, we helped overseas creators transfer, localize into Chinese through AI translation and editing, and publish content. From making contact through signing and publishing, the entire MCN launched in less than one month with a core team of only a few people.
The second example is a founder with a technical background. He built a workflow product similar to Canvas. The technology was excellent, but he did not understand marketing, and one month after launch the product had attracted no attention. We helped him:
Use AI to compare and simulate competitors, identify PMF—product-market fit—and position the product for North American users with a high willingness to pay.
Use tools to contact 10 creators on Twitter and YouTube and secure partnerships within one week, a process that might previously have taken one month.
Use AI to remix creator content, retain it as an asset, and optimize SEO. As a result, in the first week of promotion during the second month, the product welcomed its first 100 seed users.
Little Q: In September, I ran a sale to my existing audience for my course. I asked a friend to customize an RPA automation tool and used AI to market through WeChat Moments.
As you know, the number of likes on Moments has declined, but my tool scans Moments, recognizes content including text and images, and then writes intelligent comments using my habitual language.
If you post a selfie, it may not comment. If you post about work, it recognizes the context and comments, "What you said is excellent; my course also has a related methodology..." It connects the content to my course and "plants interest."
This automated the process of “making contact” for me. I ultimately sold 30 orders. The source then says “half of the average order value” came through automated interest-building on Moments, followed by human involvement to close the sale. [Editor's note: The wording is ambiguous; it is not an established count or revenue share.]
Wang Man, Abby: A technology company I serve has revenue exceeding 100 million (currency unspecified in the source). Over the past two years, it cut more than 70% of its marketing team.
What can one person do there now? From analyzing customer needs, generating creative copy, and editing video to producing event posters and delivering offline events, one person can complete everything with AI.
The key point: despite so many layoffs, revenue was entirely unaffected.
They can achieve this because:
They are extremely familiar with business processes and have mature human-machine collaboration workflows.
They are skilled at integrating resources inside and outside the company.
At the foundation is strategic thinking. AI can replace execution, but it cannot replace the strategic thinking required in senior roles.
AI Misconceptions and a Guide to Avoiding Pitfalls
Wang Mengke: In applying AI, what traps or misconceptions do you think people commonly encounter?
Little Q: Let me share a case from psychological counseling. A team wanted to use AI to replicate an eminent counselor such as Wu Zhihong and answer users' psychological-consultation questions. AI can indeed now sound very warm and provide intense emotional value.
But I think this involves an ethical misconception: the other person paid you to save their life, yet you use AI to "prescribe medicine"?
Although the technological trend is irreversible, I personally believe that a service such as psychological counseling, which reaches a person's deepest foundations, still needs delivery by a real human to be dependable; otherwise, it can easily collapse.
Manda: I returned from TechCrunch in Silicon Valley two days ago. My strongest impression was that although Silicon Valley is extremely technologically advanced, people there still believe deeply in the power of offline interaction and trust between people.
The misconception is treating AI as a god or believing it can solve every marketing problem.
Some founders say they want AI to replace the entire marketing department. That shows far too little humility. AI can help us press the accelerator and make the car move faster, but at present it still cannot completely replace the role of the "driver."
Neither extreme works: refusing AI entirely is foolish, while relying on it excessively causes mental atrophy. The ideal state is human-machine collaboration.
Wang Man, Abby: My view is that we greatly overestimate AI's ability to think.
Many people treat AI as an "answer machine" and expect it to provide the optimal solution. But AI cannot understand your deeper strategic goals and context.
Many owners in traditional industries ask me whether I can recommend a tool to solve their transformation problem. I tell them: you have not even completed "digitization," and your data remain isolated, yet you want "intelligence." That is unrealistic. It amounts to "Garbage In, Premium Garbage Out."
AI Marketing Trends for the Coming Year
Wang Mengke: Finally, summarize in one sentence the AI-marketing trend most worth watching over the next year.
Manda: In the past, people hoped to be seen; over the next year the challenge will be "being remembered." How to transform rapidly generated content assets into brand assets is the next question.
Little Q: At the platform level, digital humans are already realistic enough to pass as real people and will replace many voiceover creators. The trend next year is whether you can distinguish yourself from AI by using a "real person" to produce deeper, more emotional content such as blackboard teaching and in-depth discussions. The scarcity value of real people will rise.
Wang Man, Abby: The trend is evolution from single-purpose tools to integration across the entire workflow through an Agent. As individuals, we should pay more attention to our own physical and mental health. The heart is the source of creation; do not use only your brain, and protect your sensitivity.
Wang Mengke: What AI cannot achieve in content is style. Everyone should find and stabilize a style of their own.