Buffering

This week on Buffering, Zack and Gabe explore how AI is changing the way websites are built, maintained, and personalized. From moving beyond rigid templates and drag and drop editors to creating custom websites in minutes, the conversation looks at why businesses may no longer need to settle for a website that looks like everyone else's. They also dig into AI assisted development, structured content, email templates, the case against embedding PDFs, and why your website should be more than a place to post pricing updates.Join Zack and Gabe as they discuss how AI is lowering the barrier to custom web development, helping smaller providers compete with larger companies, and turning the website into a continuously evolving digital storefront and salesperson. Plus, they revisit the future of platforms like Wix and Squarespace, the value of personalization, and whether websites will soon need to account for the strange new world of foldable phone screens.

This week on Buffering, we are counting down ten broadband marketing taglines that might be ready for retirement. From “blazing fast” and “future proof” to “powers every device in your home,” we break down why generic claims fall flat and how we can replace them with experiences customers can actually see, understand, and trust.Join Zack and Gabe as we rethink how we market speed, reliability, local service, and value based offers. We explore how transparency and real proof can help us differentiate the experience we deliver, plus a simple challenge: remove the adjectives from your website and see what is left.

This week on Buffering, we’re retiring six customer experience mantras that may have helped build businesses but won’t necessarily help them grow. Inspired by Customer Experience expert Jon Picoult, we explore “the customer is always right” to “every interaction should delight,” Zack and Gabe challenge the CX absolutisms that oversimplify increasingly complex customer journeys. They explore why not all friction is bad, why NPS can’t tell the whole story, why more personalization isn’t always better, and why giving customers more support channels can actually create a worse experience.Join Zack and Gabe as they unpack what it means to move beyond the legacy playbook and become a true experience provider. They discuss empowering frontline teams to become trusted advisors, curating the right customer journey, using data with permission, and designing personalized offers around real customer needs and life stages. Because the playbooks that built your business may not be the ones that grow it.

This week on Buffering, we’re going beyond the AI slop problem and asking a bigger question: how can organizations actually enable their employees to use AI well? Zack and Gabe break down the training gap, why simply handing employees powerful AI tools isn’t enough, and how organizations can create clear standards for what good AI use looks like. From prompt libraries and AI labs to forklifts and ski slopes, they explore practical ways to build AI skills across an entire organization.Join Zack and Gabe as they explore an AI enablement playbook built around progressive levels of adoption, shared knowledge, guardrails, and empowering internal AI champions. They discuss why AI is ultimately a change management problem, how leaders can give employees the space to experiment and learn from failure, and why the goal isn’t to turn everyone into an AI expert overnight, but to help the entire crew move forward together.

This week on Buffering, we dive into the AI slop problem and the growing debate over whether AI is making people dumber. From cringy LinkedIn posts to low effort AI generated content, Zack and Gabe explore why bad AI is creating skepticism around the technology and why writing off AI because of its worst use cases may be a mistake.Join Zack and Gabe as they unpack how to use AI as a strategic partner rather than an answer machine. They discuss critical thinking, foundational knowledge, AI as a debate partner, lowering the cost of experimentation, and why the best AI users think, research, challenge, verify, and refine instead of simply asking, copying, and moving on. They also explore how AI can make sophisticated thinking more accessible and expand what people are capable of doing.