What Is Performance Marketing – and How Is AI Changing It?

Yesterday I could not tear myself away from the computer. When I lifted my head, it was half past eight in the evening. I had been sitting alone upstairs for about three hours.

Will AI take my job? A certified Google trainer told me in June 2024 that my profession would cease to exist. Twenty-two months later, my job title has not changed — but ninety percent of what I do during the day is different. I have delegated more of my thinking to AI agents than I thought possible. I am not afraid. This is why, and what it means for anyone asking the same question.

I have conducted roughly one hundred and fifty practical interviews over the past four years. Fifty for data specialist roles. A hundred for advertising and performance marketing specialists. Almost every one of them involved sitting down with a candidate over a practical task — something close to a real problem we actually need to solve at the company. Not theory. Not trivia. Applied problem-solving. Over time, I started noticing a pattern.

AI produces the graphic, the newsletter and the product page faster than a person. What is left for the one who used to do it is the judgement — knowing whether the output is good. But most people have worse judgement than AI. And whoever cannot judge quality cannot delegate either. How do you tell whether yours is the judgement a company relies on, or the kind it can replace?

In April, in the first part of this series, I wrote about an AI prediction system I had started building on my own machine. At the time the software was a few hours old and the prediction record was empty. The record since then has shown one thing — the system does not yet understand the market it is being asked to forecast. It can pull macro context, book value, earnings. But it cannot put those together into something that helps it understand the price.

Prague, 13 May 2026. On my way to work I started thinking about something that stayed with me for days. If most routine work on a computer disappears in the next ten years, and a large share of repetitive manual work disappears with it, what happens to the flow of money? Who pays whom for what? Which economic layers will exist, how large will they be, and what relationships will run between them? This is the six-layer map I sketched as an answer.

I am building an AI system to predict the S&P 500. It runs on my own machine, uses free public data — yfinance, FRED, the Shiller dataset — and grades every forecast against reality. This series documents the build itself: the decisions, the methodology, the mistakes. What I will eventually share from the running system is a separate question, and an honest one.

One hour. Fifty-five minutes. That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A working tool — the one the company actually needed. By the evening of the same day, it was running on staging. This is not about Claude Code. It is about what Claude Code exposes.

Before you can teach AI to understand anything, you need to see what it is hiding from you.

The moment other people needed access to it, the problem changed completely. It was no longer about whether the agent could learn. It was about who gets to teach it.

Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.