The thing I'd been doing all along
I learned HTML at twelve, from a website called HTML Goodies. I built my first website on a school computer with a 13-inch CRT and a beige tower that hummed like it was trying to leave the room. Four people signed my guestbook. One of them told me my marquee was too fast.
That was the first time I shipped something. I have not stopped since.
I have been a person who builds things on screens for 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 ten years I did that work at the senior leadership level. Strategic plans. Competitive intelligence. Brand work. Pursuit work. The receipts are real and they live on LinkedIn.
The day I asked Claude a real question
I was supposed to use Claude for emails. The first day I used it for emails. The second day I asked it a question I'd been carrying around for three months — a real question, the kind that makes your shoulders crawl up to your ears. I will not write the question here because the answer is private. But I will tell you what happened.
Claude answered in a way no human had. Not because the answer was correct, exactly. Because the answer was patient. Because the answer didn't perform certainty. Because the answer asked me, in the next sentence, what I'd already tried.
That was the second time I shipped something.
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 I left, and why
In February 2026, I left my role as a senior marketing leader at Credo Health. I had been there a long time. I had built a lot. The work I did there is some of the work I am most proud of in twenty years. None of that is the reason I left.
I left because the practice I was developing — using AI as a real instrument, with judgment and taste and a thousand small attentions — was outgrowing the institutional shape it had to fit inside. I could feel myself making the work smaller to fit the room. The room was a good room. But the work wanted a workbench.
So I built one.
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 — twice a week, 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