We just spent $1 Million on Claude

Hi {{first_name | there}},

Every day I wake up and I feel behind on AI.

Which is a strange thing to say considering how “AI-pilled” Luxury Presence is. Since we went all in on AI over 2 years ago, we’ve launched several industry-first AI products for SEO, paid ads, and an AI-native CRM. We doubled our growth rate last year, accelerating towards $100M in ARR, while improving profitability—all thanks to AI.

Tech right now is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen. Years are happening in months. Months are happening in weeks. Weeks are happening in days. It’s exhausting and exhilarating at the same time.

Every founder I respect feels the same way. The closer you are to the technology, the more you feel it. The people who seem most relaxed about AI are the ones who aren’t paying close enough attention.

For nearly all companies, the range of what could happen next—good and bad—has gotten dramatically wider.

It’s also true for individuals. An “AI-native” employee can often do 5x more and better work in less time.

The divide between AI-native and everyone else is growing every day.

We signed a contract with Anthropic committing to spend at least $1 million on AI credits this year. It will likely end up being significantly more.

To many of you, that number will seem high. To some of you, it will seem very low.

So why am I so confident about this bet? Because I’ve seen the results firsthand.

Most of the public conversation around AI has been about efficiency. But what’s most interesting is AI doing work that wasn’t possible before at all.

Giving every customer white-glove service that used to be reserved for your biggest accounts. Solving bugs in minutes instead of days. Building things that were never going to make the roadmap because they weren't economically viable.

Here’s one of my favorite examples. Our product team built a focus group made up of “synthetic users.” We trained AI agents on thousands of anonymized customer calls to model our most common personas. Now we test features and marketing copy in minutes instead of waiting weeks. I wrote about this in Fast Company.

Efficiency is important. It’s part of my job, and if you run a company, it’s yours too. But it’s not what energizes me about AI. Doing things faster is fine. Doing things we never thought possible—that’s inspiring.

AI credits are the easy part. The hard part is changing how 500 people work.

We made this mistake early on. We thought it was about the tools. It’s not.

You can’t hand someone a new tool and expect transformation. In the early days, we just got people ChatGPT licenses. Some people figured out cool use cases, but the results were scattered and inconsistent. Finally, we centralized our internal AI Operations team and approached employee training systematically.

At our leadership offsite in Austin, our CTO and Head of Applied AI taught a workshop for all of our Directors. As they built dashboards, prototypes, and Claude skills for their teams, you could see the lightbulbs going on. Claude usage across non-engineering went up 3x the next day.

The gap between AI-native teams and everyone else is growing fast. And it’s largely a culture gap. The technology is available to everyone. What’s not is the willingness to change how you work, the patience to unlearn old habits, the courage to prepare for what’s coming.

One of our SEO managers taught himself AI automation tools like N8N on nights and weekends so we offered him a role on our AI Operations team. He saw the opportunity and went for it. Now he’s in a high-demand job, building internal AI tools for our teams.

When people have the information and can see a path forward, they bring the motivation.

Not everything should be automated and there is real risk in over-relying on AI. The internet is full of undifferentiated AI slop. No one wants more of that.

AI has made me appreciate the importance of craft, taste, and art more than ever. Some things are just better when they’re “hand-crafted.”

Knowing when to use AI is just as important as knowing how to use it. We use a simple framework to decide where AI belongs and where it doesn’t.

One axis is the knowledge required: is it data-driven, or does it demand human experience? The other axis is the cost of getting it wrong. Together, they tell you whether AI should own the task, support it, or stay in the background.

Data entry and scheduling? Fully automate. Financial reporting or legal review? AI produces, a human verifies. Client relationships, negotiations, strategic calls? Keep those human-led.

Our social media AI product (coming soon) is a good example of the middle ground. AI generates a content strategy, a calendar, and a month’s worth of posts. Our marketing experts review each one. Then the customer approves or rejects each post, and our AI learns from the feedback and improves over time. 

Because of the never-ending hype and headlines, AI exhaustion is setting in. Everyone is wondering how to future-proof their career and their business.

I don’t have all the answers. But I know that putting your head in the sand is not a strategy. Many jobs in tech are going to change dramatically. Some roles will go away entirely. That’s already happening.

But new roles are emerging. A year ago, we didn’t have an AI Operations team. We didn’t have a Generative AI Media Designer or a Content Engineer. Those roles didn’t exist. Now they’re some of the most important people in the company.

The thing I keep coming back to: focus on what makes you irreplaceable. Stay curious and learn the new skills that matter now. And don’t be too proud to let AI do the things it can already do better than us.

There’s a word in German, Fingerspitzengefühl. It means something like “fingertip feeling.” Awareness. Intuition. Reading a room. Building trust. Making a judgment call no data set can make for you. Most of us have it, AI probably never will. Focus here.

Thanks for reading. I’ll keep it useful.

Malte