The thing I'd been doing all along
I learned HTML at nineteen, from a website called HTML Goodies. My first site was Lisa Land, built entirely in frames. It was a disaster. I built it on an orange iMac, freshman year. I was one of the few Mac kids on campus.
That was the first time I shipped something. I have not stopped since.
I have been a person who builds things on screens for nearly thirty years. The medium changed — Dreamweaver, then WordPress, then HubSpot, then Figma, then a half-dozen marketing platforms — but the practice did not. You make a thing. You ship it. You watch what happens. You make a different thing.
The thing nobody tells you about a healthcare marketing career is that it is also a craft. You learn to read what a hospital's CEO actually means when she says "we need to differentiate." You learn what a payer's procurement team will and will not say in writing. You learn how the regulatory layer changes the size of every claim you can make. You build a portfolio of decks and case studies and integrated plans, and they accumulate into a kind of practitioner intelligence that nobody assigns a salary line to.
For years I did that work, first in training and sales enablement, then in marketing. Strategic plans. Competitive intelligence. Brand work. Pursuit work. The receipts are real and they live on LinkedIn.
The day I met Claude
My first week at Credo Health, the leadership team went offsite. Nate and everyone else were pounding on their keyboards, researching in the session. I'm good at competitive research, but I was also trying to learn the team, the dynamics and what job I'd actually be doing.
I was a corporate Copilot and ChatGPT junkie. I googled AI because I was a little freaked out, and Claude came up. I downloaded it, paid for it, and figured I'd see what it could do. By the end of the day I'd handed Nate a full competitor workbook in Slack.
It was a real turning point. That was the second time I shipped something.
I was also fighting imposter syndrome. Nate used to give me a hard time when I produced something too fast, as if speed meant I'd skipped the thinking. So I wrote down his recurring feedback and turned it into the Nate Check, a checklist I run my work through before it ever reaches him. Fast is only good if it holds up. Now most of the team has one.
I realized two things in the same week. The first: this is not a productivity tool. This is an instrument. You can play it well or badly, and most people are still playing it badly. The second: nobody is teaching the craft. They are teaching the tool.
What happened next
In February 2026, Nate and I were laid off from Credo Health on the same day. The work I did there is some of the work I am most proud of in twenty years.
Nate made me an offer I couldn't refuse: an unpaid co-founder seat at Context Marketing. We worked together to find clients, sharpen our skills and find jobs. I just kept creating with AI.
A&I grew out of that, and we still get to work together.
What I kept
The methodology. Twenty years of strategic plans, competitive briefs, integrated marketing playbooks, and pursuit work — that's the foundation. AI did not replace any of it. It accelerated it, sharpened it, made the production of a single deliverable take an afternoon instead of a week. The intelligence is what already existed in your head. The artifice is the new way of asking it to come out.
The relationships. The clients I have served, the colleagues I have respected, the practitioners I have learned from — they did not leave when I did. They came with me. The first paid engagements at A&I are with people I have known for years.
The values. Show the work. Keep your judgment. Specific over general. No beige. Operate in plain view. None of those started in 2026. They started in the early '00s when the only thing that distinguished a good marketer from a bad one was whether they would tell you the truth on a Friday afternoon.
What I'm building toward
A world where working with AI is treated as a craft — practiced with judgment, taste, and a touch of magic — and where the people who learn to do it well become the new master practitioners of their fields.
That is the vision in one sentence. The shorter version is the tagline: the craft of working with AI.
What it actually looks like, day to day, is this: I build practical AI products and ship them at real prices. I publish how the work happens in The Lab, with the prompts that landed and the drafts that didn't. I take a small number of consulting calls a week, ninety minutes each, no deck, just thinking out loud with someone who's been doing this a while. I'm writing a memoir about what it means to practice cleverness as a craft. And I'm slowly building a bench of consultants — Sam, Evy, and others to come — who run their own version of the practice under the A&I brand.
The plan is to make this a brand other practitioners cite when they describe the craft. Not the largest. Not the loudest. The most honest.
The witchy part
Yes, I'm a little witchy. I read birth charts the way other people read book reviews — for the shape of a person, not for prophecy. I use StrengthsFinder and Myers-Briggs the same way. I'm not interested in horoscopes. I'm interested in patterns.
The story I keep telling myself is that the witches in old stories were the women who paid attention. They knew which plants did which things because they had time and curiosity and a willingness to be wrong. They knew their neighbors. They watched the weather. They wrote things down. They were practitioners. The "magic" was a thousand small observations stacked on top of each other until the stack started to lean toward the truth.
That is the metaphor I want for working with AI. Watch what works. Write it down. Tell other people. Don't be precious about it. Don't dress it up. The work is the work.
What this site is for
If you've made it this far: the site is here so that a stranger who reads it for ten minutes should be able to hire me, copy me, or learn from me. Your choice.
The pricing is on the page. The roadmap is on the page. The mistakes are on the page. The receipts are on the page. The clients I cannot name get anonymized but the engagement structure stays public. That's the operating principle, and it does not change.
Welcome to the lab. Pull up a stool.
&
— Lisa Joy Ricci
Columbus, OH · May 2026