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Stephen Gilbert is co-founder and CEO of Anchour, a branding and marketing agency headquartered in New Gloucester that works with consumer brands, credit unions, and service businesses across the country.
I’ve worked with artificial intelligence every day since 2022, even before ChatGPT came out and made it dinner-table conversation. It comes with my job. I run a branding and marketing agency in Maine, and AI now touches almost everything we do.
People in my line of work usually sound very sure of themselves about AI. I’m not. How fast it’s moving scares me.
When I started, AI was a light assistant. You typed a question, it typed back, and sometimes it sped things up. It was handy, a little clumsy, and easy to keep at arm’s length.
Four years later, it takes on deep, multi-step work by itself. It makes a plan, does the job inside the software we already use, checks its own work, and reports back.
Take a brand photo shoot. Before anyone picks up a camera, someone has to dream up the concept and show the client every shot. That used to take our team days. Now we can go from a rough idea to life-like previews of the whole shoot in an afternoon. That gives us more time to get the idea right.
I’ve built more tools with AI than I can count, including ones our team uses every day for brand writing, media planning and client reports. It helps me do my job, and it makes my work better. It teaches me something almost every day. What it can do is amazing.
And it still freaks me out.
Nobody knows where this is going, including the companies building it. The governor’s office has said nearly one in five American workers is highly exposed to AI. It might wipe out a lot of jobs. It might create work none of us can picture yet. Unless someone has figured out time travel, anyone who tells you they know how this ends is guessing.
What I do know is what it’s done for us. Used properly, it’s done far more good than bad.
It’s leveled the playing field for a small agency in New Gloucester. A few years ago, only the big national agencies could afford a full research department and engineers building their own proprietary software. Now, with AI, we can do both. That’s how we’ve beaten much bigger firms for major projects with national brands, the kind we wouldn’t have had a shot at before.
AI is only as good as the people using it. It can hand you a pile of ideas in seconds. It takes someone with lots of talent and judgment to know which one is right, make it great, and catch what the machine got wrong. That’s why we keep hiring. Our team has grown from about 25 people in 2024 to 45 today. I can’t promise that lasts, and I won’t pretend to.
My ask, whether you run a business, work for one, or are still in school: Learn it now. Use it, and get a feel for what it can do and where it fails. The people who understand this technology will have a say in how it’s used at work, in our towns and in our government. The people who wait will have those decisions made for them.
Maine’s AI task force has recommended a public AI literacy campaign. I agree. You can be uneasy about AI and still learn how it works. I’m both.
I’ve spent four years inside this shift, and I still don’t know where it ends. I’d rather face it with my eyes open, and I hope more Mainers will too.