AI Is Coming For Your Job if You Let It

“They’re saying it's a big step up in their machine learning functionality, but we doubt it will work.” The account manager continued talking, but Daniel Pearson had tuned them out. The insight hit him like lightning. Facebook was launching AI functionality that would replace 10% of the work his company was doing for clients. It was going to work. And they weren’t going to stop. They were going to replace it all. It had been only two years since his company was founded, and Facebook was on a fast track to put him out of business.

Hailing from a working-class family in a small Michigan town, Pearson puts a lot of stock in the value of hard work, having a low ego, and being in the service of others. That mindset drove his first venture into entrepreneurship, inspired by his dad’s landscaping side hustle. By purchasing tools and hiring his own employees, Pearson learned to increase his impact while operating within similar constraints—a practice he’ll refer to as “adding leverage.” When he went to college, he sold the business but never forgot the lessons he learned along the way. The experience inspired him to study entrepreneurship, as it seemed the avenue that would allow him to serve the most people possible.

Pearson started his career in 2011 in the San Francisco startup scene at Zaarly, one of the first non-gaming apps on the App Store. It was a marketplace like Craigslist, except the buyers would post their requests rather than searching for listed items. It was Pearson’s job to promote the listing and fulfil the buyer’s request - acting like a concierge. The problem was that he was constrained by his own capacity, which wasn’t sufficient for the scale of impact he wanted to have in the role. There had to be a way to add leverage. That was when Pearson got wind of the freelance economy booming overseas. It was the perfect solution to his limited bandwidth, so he began hiring workers in the Philippines, unbeknownst to his manager and leadership team. At one point, he had 50-60 workers split into teams competing to fulfil the most requests. His productivity skyrocketed and caught the attention of his boss, who was blown away by the numbers—if not a little surprised by his creative methods.

In 2012, Pearson landed his next position in inventory acquisition at Threadflip, a Poshmark competitor. When he came on, the company had seen early traction and had a few thousand dollars in monthly inventory posted on the site. Pearson saw that as an opportunity to add leverage. At the time, Etsy was already a successful marketplace, and he had an idea to bring vintage clothing sellers from Etsy to post their inventory to Threadflip’s site, too. Pearson identified a vulnerability in Etsy’s checkout that exposed the seller’s email and built a tool that let them cross-list their inventory with the click of one button, sending it out to every email he could capture. Suddenly, Threadflip was seeing millions in inventory listed almost overnight.

A year into his time at Threadflip, Pearson identified an opportunity to expand his impact. They had been working with an external contractor to buy user-acquisition ads. Ads could be a powerful tool for adding leverage, he knew this from seeing the ad agency working at Zaarly. Pearson took on this responsibility directly at Threadflip, eventually morphing into a growth marketer driving user acquisition and engagement through ads, emails, and creative campaigns.

It was at this time that the nagging feeling that there was more impact to be had returned. If Pearson could do this for Threadflip, what if he could do it for multiple companies? He decided to approach his CEO, Manik Singh, about starting his own business. Singh was supportive and offered to make Threadflip Pearson’s first paid client and convert Pearson’s position to an agency contract. With that, Pearson struck out in 2014 to found Bamboo, a company named after his insatiable hunger for growth.

It was the perfect year to launch a mobile growth agency. Apple had just launched the iPhone 6, which featured larger screens and improved cameras. iOS 8 was the most significant release since the App Store was first announced. Most importantly, the AppStore crossed 1 million apps for the first time with 75 billion total downloads. It was a thriving marketplace with tough competition, the perfect environment for someone with a proven record in outsized impact. Pearson founded Bamboo as a media buying business that bid for ad slots based on the clients’ budget and what platform would get them the most engagement. He likens it to being a day trader, where he spent 10% of his day adjusting bids. In 2014 it was a lucrative enterprise, and in his first year, he made $500,000 in revenue, and $1.5 million in the second. ‘We just kept it moving,’ Pearson said.

Things looked bright until 2016, when Facebook dipped into machine learning and launched App Event Optimization, a platform that did the bidding work Bamboo did, but automatically and in a fraction of the time. The client could just tell Facebook’s platform their goals and it would automatically place bids to achieve them. Despite initial cynicism from others in the industry, Pearson saw the writing on the wall and knew that the bidding work was gone for good, and more of his services would soon be replaced if he didn’t make a change.

What Pearson did was bid on ad space, but why he was hired was what mattered. His customers’ “why” was business growth. They hired him to acquire users, not just to bid on ads. Pearson came to the realization that Bamboo was more than just a media buying business—it was a growth business. So, had Facebook’s venture actually rendered their service obsolete, or did it create leverage for him to produce more value?

‘We have to stay ahead of the tech curves,’ Pearson said. Instead of fighting against the wave of automated bidding, he leaned into the skid. Pearson was able to eliminate three to four percent of that spend and pass those savings on to his clients. Pearson quotes Jeff Bezos, ‘Your margin is my opportunity.’ Instead of letting Facebook put him out of business, he changed his entire workflow to save his clients’ money, widen their margins, and grow their business - and his.

That, he said, is how you approach the current wave of AI in business. Instead of fighting it, find a way to harness it to more effectively serve. Examine why you’re hired, not what for. For Pearson, it was growth. They hired him to grow, and he did it through ad space bidding. When that became obsolete, he was able to offer other services because he understood that his clients still needed to grow. Ad buying was the bottleneck that he specialized in which could’ve driven him under if he hadn’t seen the signs.

Another bottleneck, according to Pearson, was ad creative, but with the release of Sora 2 and other creative AI tools, it will likely be the next domino to fall. So, take a page from Pearson’s book and don’t specialize around the current bottleneck, but focus on removing them for customers. You’re not saving your position by holding on to the past. It’s not a question of if what you’re doing today will be replaced, it’s a question of when.

But that raises the question, when “what” you do is constantly under threat of obsoleteness, how do you approach fulfillment? How can you take pride in work that will eventually be done automatically? Pearson said you have to find joy in the progress. You have to have an insatiable hunger for the next new thing. When asked where that drive comes from, Pearson said, “I find so much joy in it. I’m fascinated by how the future is going to shape out and how I can be a part of that future. I don’t do it for any particular reason; I just know that that’s what gives me energy. I’m really big about going after things that give me energy.”

In a world where the “what” you’re doing is constantly under threat, an audit of “why” is constantly necessary to make sure you are maintaining your energy. Chasing what fills your cup and fulfills you is essential.

If there’s something to be learned in Pearson’s story, it’s to analyze your ethos and put stock in your customers’ “why.” Determine “why” you’re hired to do what you do and how AI fits into that model. How can AI expedite the process to deliver higher-quality results? How can you develop skills and knowledge to increase your leverage? Will you reject progress and be swallowed up by your peers, or will you embrace your clients’ “why” and welcome the tools to get the job done? Pearson embraced the “why,” and Bamboo is still here, thriving eleven years later.

Payne Spiva (c) 2025