Case Study: Alex's Capstone Plan — The Marketing AI Practitioner

Alex's Starting Point

When Alex sits down to complete her Personal AI Mastery Plan, she's eighteen months into her AI adoption journey. She's gone from a solo practitioner experimenting with AI tools to a team lead who rolled out AI adoption to a 10-person team, built and maintained a team AI policy, developed a shared prompt library, and conducted an ROI analysis that convinced leadership to renew and expand their AI license.

She's not done. She knows exactly what's missing: her own practice has been somewhat sacrificed to building the team's infrastructure. While she's been excellent at the leadership and organizational dimensions of AI adoption, her personal prompting has gotten stagnant. She has good prompts from eighteen months ago that she hasn't improved.

This capstone is her return to personal practice.

Her Six-Dimension Assessment

Mental Models & Trust Calibration: 4

Alex's trust calibration is good for marketing use cases. She knows that AI is reliable for first-draft content, research synthesis, and formatting — and unreliable for brand-specific voice, specific data points, and novel creative concepts. She's calibrated through experience and documents it.

She gives herself a 4 rather than a 5 because she hasn't systematically reviewed her calibration in six months. AI capabilities have evolved; her calibration map may be stale.

Prompting: 4

Alex's prompts are solid and produce consistent results. She has a library of 18 entries covering her team's core use cases. Where she scores herself short of 5: she rarely writes prompts that feel genuinely innovative, and she suspects she's gotten comfortable with prompts that are good but not excellent.

Platform Knowledge: 3

She's a proficient user of two platforms but has limited familiarity with the broader landscape. She knows she should understand the alternatives better, both for herself and for advising her organization.

Workflow Integration: 4

AI is deeply integrated into her content creation and research workflows. She's built the custom brand-voice assistant. The workflows are documented and others on her team follow them.

Critical Thinking & Ethics: 4

Her verification habits are solid. She's worked out her positions on attribution and disclosure for client-facing work. The gap: she hasn't revisited her ethical positions in several months, and the landscape has evolved.

Advanced Skills: 3

She has basic measurement practice but it's inconsistent. She's built one custom assistant. She hasn't explored API-level capabilities.

Total: 22/30 — Proficient

Her Primary Growth Path

Practitioner primary, Leader secondary.

Alex's core goal is being the most effective AI-augmented marketing practitioner she can be. The leader dimension is already well-developed; the practitioner dimension is where she has room to grow.

The 30-Day Sprint

Goal: Transform her prompt library from good to excellent. Take each of her 18 existing prompts, use it five times in the next month, note any limitations or improvements, and update the prompt with specific improvements.

Why this goal: Alex's sense is that her prompts were good when she wrote them but haven't evolved with her skill or with AI capability changes. A systematic improvement pass will both improve her outputs and reveal where her prompting has gotten stale.

The habit: After every significant AI interaction, write one line in a notes file: "What would have made this prompt better?" Not a full journal entry — just one line. This is the minimal version of the reflective habit that she can actually sustain given her schedule.

Quick win: This week, take the three most-used prompts in her library and run them on current projects. Note what's working and what needs improvement.

The 90-Day Plan

Primary skill investment: Measurement practice, properly established.

Alex has been doing measurement in a rough way — tracking time savings and noting quality trends — but she hasn't done the rigorous monthly analysis that would give her actionable data. In 90 days, she'll have three monthly analysis reports, a clear picture of her highest and lowest-leverage AI use cases, and a refined understanding of where her prompting is strong and where it needs work.

New capability: Reasoning models for content strategy.

Alex has been using standard models for all her work. She's heard that reasoning models perform differently on complex analytical tasks. Her 90-day plan: evaluate whether reasoning models improve her marketing strategy analysis — competitive positioning, audience analysis, campaign strategic framework development. She'll run her standard prompts on a reasoning model and compare outputs.

Learning investment: One deep conversation per month with a marketing AI practitioner outside her organization. She has two contacts she's identified who are ahead of her in specific areas. She'll have one conversation each month, with a specific question prepared: "Tell me the most effective AI workflow you've developed that I probably haven't tried."

The One-Year Vision

In one year, Alex's AI practice will be characterized by excellence rather than competence. The difference:

Her prompt library will have 30 entries, each refined through at least five real-world uses and documented with quality notes. She'll know exactly which prompts produce excellent first outputs and which require iteration — and she'll have improved the second category to first-category quality.

Her measurement practice will be generating monthly reports that she actually uses to make decisions. She'll know her AI batting average by task category, her iteration efficiency trend, and her top and bottom AI use cases by ROI.

She'll have evaluated three AI platforms she doesn't currently use and have a calibrated opinion about the alternatives to her current primary tool.

She'll be the person in her organization that two other team leads consult when they're thinking through AI adoption questions — not because it's her job title, but because she's built the credibility through demonstrated results and thoughtful practice.

One-year metrics: - Prompt library: 30 entries, all reviewed and updated in the past 90 days - Monthly measurement analysis: consistent for 12 months - Team aggregate time savings: 15+ hours/week - Her own batting average: above 0.70 on her primary use cases

What Alex Will Do Differently Next Week

Start: Writing one-line "improvement notes" after significant AI interactions. Takes sixty seconds; takes no time from her calendar.

Stop: Using first outputs from her older prompts without checking whether they've degraded from AI capability changes or whether she's gotten used to output that's good rather than excellent.

Improve: Her brand voice prompt — the one used most frequently across her team. She'll revise it with three specific improvements she's been meaning to make for months.

Her Closing Reflection

"Eighteen months ago, I didn't really believe AI would work the way the enthusiasts said. I thought I'd try it, find it useful for a few specific things, and that would be that.

What I didn't expect was that it would change how I think about my work. Not in a scary way — in a clarifying way. AI is really good at producing comprehensive, organized, competent content. What I'm good at is knowing what this specific client needs, what would actually connect with this specific audience, what would make this campaign different from everything else they've seen. AI can't do that. But AI doing the comprehensive competent part faster means I have more time for the specific differentiated part.

That's the partnership I've built. And I think I'm just getting started on making it better."

Alex's practice continues. Her next major milestone — the methodology presentation at the marketing leadership summit — is eight months away.