4 levels of AI. Most people are stuck on level 2.

Are you looking to get in front of 200,000+ AI readers? Sponsor CoolDeep AI Newsletter.

Was this email forwarded to you? Subscribe here!

Today’s Sponsor

22 ChatGPT Agents Built for Every Marketing Job

Most marketers use ChatGPT to do general research and then call it an AI strategy. The ones outperforming them are deploying specialized agents built for specific jobs.

We put together 22 plug-and-play ChatGPT marketing agents that handle the work eating your week, each with built-in instructions and structured outputs ready to go in under 5 minutes.

Subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain and get all 22 free.

Inside you'll find:

• Competitive intelligence agent that visits competitor websites and builds detailed comparison matrices automatically

• Customer feedback analyzer that ranks improvement opportunities by business impact

• Social listening specialist that monitors brand mentions and flags reputation risks before they escalate

• Campaign optimization agents that handle attribution analysis and surface what is actually driving results

Your competitors are already running agents like these.

Get 22 ChatGPT Marketing Agents free when you subscribe to Marketing Against the Grain today.

Get The Guide

Level 1: Unacceptable

This one is obvious. You are not using AI at all.

No ChatGPT. No Claude. No Gemini. Nothing. You are doing every task by hand the same way you did it in 2019.

There is no judgment here, but there is no future here either. If this is a teammate, this is the person you have to worry about. If this is you, the good news is the next level is one tab away.

Level 2: Capable

This is where most of the world lives right now.

You open ChatGPT or Claude. You ask it questions. You use it to search, to draft an email, to summarise an article. You believe in it a little. It saves you a few minutes here and there.

This is good. This is real progress. But here is the trap. Level 2 feels like the destination. It is not. It is the front door. You are talking to one tool, one question at a time, and then closing the tab. You are getting maybe 5 percent of what is actually available to you.

The reason this matters is a number that should bother you. Only 9 percent of companies are actually scaling with AI right now. The other 91 percent are sitting at level 2, poking at ChatGPT, calling it transformation. Almost nobody is shipping. That is not a technology problem. The tools clearly work for some people. It is an implementation problem. And implementation is exactly what the next two levels are about.

Level 3: Adaptive

This is where it stops being a chatbot and starts being a system.

At level 3 you are not asking one off questions anymore. You are building end to end workflows. Let me make that concrete, because the phrase sounds bigger than it is.

An end to end workflow is just three steps. A human gives an input. The AI does the thinking in the middle. The human reviews the output. That is it. Most of the work you do every day is already a workflow like this. You are just doing the middle part by hand.

Once you see that, you start stacking these workflows together. And when you stack enough of them around one job, you get a specialist agent.

One agent that is good at SEO. One that is good at email. One that is good at ad creative. You stop using a generic assistant and you start building specialists that go deep in one area.

The shift in how it feels is enormous. One person we work with described going back to normal work after this as drinking soup with a fork. It technically functions. It just does not work. Once you have specialist agents running your repeat tasks, doing it the old way feels exactly like that.

Level 4: Transformative

This is the top floor. This is closed loops.

For most of history we humans worked in open loops. Hey Bob, how is that report going. Hey Mike, how are the paid ads doing. Hey Anna, where are we on the creatives. Constant checking in. Nobody enjoys it. Nobody wants to be chased and nobody wants to do the chasing.

A closed loop removes the chasing. It is a set of tasks where agents do the work, check each other, and improve over time without you standing over them. You point a human at the top to manage the loop, and the loop runs.

Here is a real example of what that looks like. You can now tell one agent to look at your ad account, double down on the creatives that are working, spin up 200 variations of them, and kill the campaigns that are dead. Work that used to take 2 weeks gets compressed into about 2 seconds. That is the whole game. You are not saving time anymore. You are compressing it.

So the org chart of the future is simple. Humans at the top. Specialist agents below them. Closed loops connecting the agents. If your team is built that way, it compounds. If it is not, it stalls.

10 AI Stocks to Lead the Next Decade

AI isn’t a tech trend – it’s a full-blown, multi-trillion dollar race, and 10 companies are already pulling ahead.

These are the innovators driving real revenue, attracting institutional attention, and positioning for massive growth.

Get all 10 tickers in The 10 Best AI Stocks to Own in 2026, free today.

Download Now

*Partnered

How to actually climb. Three moves by Friday.

Theory is nice. Here is what to do this week.

First, pick one workflow that repeats every single week and gives you the largest return. You know what it is. The annoying thing you do every Monday. That is your first target.

Second, map it as the three steps. Human input. AI thinking. Human review. Write it down literally like that. Most people skip this and that is why their AI use stays stuck at level 2.

Third, build that one workflow and run it for a week. That is the light bulb moment. Once one repeating task runs without you, you will never look at AI as a search box again. Then you build the second one.

You do not need a course. You do not need to be technical. I am not technical and I just like nerding out on this stuff.

The people winning with AI right now are not smarter than you. They are just earlier than you. They started before they felt ready.

The brain you build for yourself first is what you eventually hand to your whole team. One human plus five agents is a 10x team member. Maybe more. But it starts with one workflow, this week.

Start climbing. You are closer to level 4 than you think.

Stay curious, talk to you tomorrow.

Stay curious, talk to you tomorrow.

CoolDeep AI
Helping you stay ahead with AI & productivity

Get the AI Edge Before Everyone Else

The best AI opportunities and stock ideas move fast. Get our research, AI tool picks, and market insights delivered straight to your phone, so you never miss what's moving next. Our text alerts keep you updated on the AI stocks and tools that matter, whether you're in a meeting, commuting, or away from your desk.

Get Text Alerts from CoolDeep AI (free)