The Day AI Became Real

If you know me at all, you know I’ve spent years talking about how artificial intelligence was going to reshape… well, everything. Friends teased me. Colleagues rolled their eyes.

“Scott’s on his AI rant again.”

Fair enough — I earned that reputation.

But in August 2021, something happened that shifted the conversation from theory to reality. I finally received early API access to OpenAI’s GPT-3.

At the time, I was looking for fresh creative fuel. The year before, in 2020, I’d released my first generative ambient electronic music album — a passion project built on algorithmic composition. For my next act, I wanted to go bigger. More cinematic. Maybe even score a short animated space-opera series. The problem? I didn’t have a story yet. Just vibes, textures, and mental sketches.

So when the OpenAI access came through, I figured: Why not see what this thing can do?

A Half Sentence That Opened a Door

I typed a fragment:

“Here is a scene from an animated series about a hapless band of futuristic space station musicians who are also smugglers. In this scene they have to escape the space station, Teluron 6, because several New Alliance troops recognize the drummer, Julip, who has a warrant for his arrest by—”

And I stopped mid-sentence on purpose to see what this thing could do.

In a few seconds, it conjured a world.

A warlord named Goosh Alabah.
A dragon-like pursuit ship.
A shimmering sanctuary on Brahmandi VII.
A mystical tradition of music as language.
Characters, conflicts, textures — all appearing out of nowhere, with an energy and confidence I wasn’t prepared for.

I remember sitting back in my chair, hands off the keyboard, just staring at the screen. I was stunned.

It was the first time I truly understood that the future I’d been preaching about — loudly, and to the amusement of my friends — had arrived. Faith had turned to fact.

This wasn’t predictive analytics. This wasn’t classic machine learning. It was creative. Thoughtful. Interesting! It felt like the door to a new era had quietly swung open. And I was looking straight through it.

More Than a Hobby

Up until that point, AI had been a deep interest, a professional curiosity. But after that moment, it became something else entirely — a mandate. I had to know more. I had to understand how. My mind was swimming with the possible implications.

Because if a half-finished sentence could produce a fully formed scene …
If a model could improvise story structure, emotional tone, and world-building …
If it could do something fundamentally generative — not just analytical — then the implications weren’t incremental. They were transformational.

I knew then that businesses, governments, nonprofits, and individuals would all need help understanding and adapting to this reality. I didn’t know how yet, but I knew that this would become my new mission.

The Spark That Led to IAG

That early GPT-3 moment didn’t directly create the Intelligence Advisory Group, but it planted the seed. It was the first time I realized that thousands of organizations and millions of people would eventually share this same feeling. I believe that’s when my subconscious started planning how I could help spread the word, assist people in understanding the implications, and, if I were lucky enough, possibly be involved in shaping its adoption in the real world.

Organizations of every size would need a guide, a translator, a strategist. Someone who had been working with data long before AI models could write stories or compose music or reason through a problem.

And honestly? It still excites me as much today as it did in that quiet moment in 2021.

AI is accelerating, expanding, and becoming more capable by the month — and IAG exists to help people keep up with it, make sense of it, and turn it into value.

But for me, it all started with a half-sentence and an intelligence that offered up a more interesting story than I had yet to imagine.

—Scott
Founder, Intelligence Advisory Group