Van Tucker

AI Wrangler + Partner at CMG || AI tech + growth builder, scaling brands that move fast.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

@thesamparr 🚀🤠

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Today made a theme song. This will be fun!

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Episode #1 of AI Wrangler on the Streets: Meet Cole, he is building the first ecommerce website for his family's business, A&R Meats in Red Bluff, CA. Their entire product list lives in a paper notebook.

So we pulled out a phone and started capturing pages.

By the time we sat back down, that notebook was a working menu.

His words: "This would take me a week to do what you say it's going to do in ten minutes."

The stack, for anyone who wants it:
- Wispr Flow for voice to text
- Claude Fable for the menu build and product research, and a P&L calculator built on the spot.

Nothing exotic.
Tools you can start using this week.

That's the idea behind AI Wrangler On the Streets. No slides, no theory. One real bottleneck, wrangled on camera.

We'll check back in with Cole as the site goes live.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Taming the AI agents one morning at a time. ���️🤠

Every AI build starts the same way: diagnose, build, deploy, compound.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Life lately: AI building + core memories mode. Long days, late nights, and a lot of ideas + adventures becoming real.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

I’m excited to announce my new venture: Collective Media Group. I stepped away from agency life in 2019, and AI is what pulled me back.

I’ve always loved the same thing: working with emerging brands and accelerating their results. AI brought that energy back, and made it possible at a level that wasn’t achievable before.

CMG is an AI-Native, end-to-end growth partner for ambitious businesses, from emerging brands to established operators. Strategy, AI engineering, performance media, creative, digital experience, and retention, run by one integrated team.

Most agencies sell you a service and hand the work over a wall. We operate differently: agency structure, AI-operator mindset. We diagnose what’s holding growth back, deploy across the full funnel, and compound the gains over time.

CMG is also home to AI Wrangler, inspiring the ethos of AI through media, education, and AI support. If you’ve followed AI Wrangler, this is the bigger picture it lives inside.

We’ve partnered with leading AI and ecosystem providers, and we’ll be expanding partnerships rapidly over the next few months.

Let’s Build. 🤠

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Happy 250th America 🇺🇸🚀🛠️

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

@Seanfrank https://t.co/h8x59i3bGB, includes a managed creators agency

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

@jordan_ross_8F Calls

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

I woke up to a $12,450 usage bill this morning. Happy Monday. My first thought: the AI went off the rails. I must have forgot to set a spending limit. Must have run some infinite loop while I was sleeping. Credits burned. Budget destroyed.

Nope.
It wasn't AI credits at all.

It was a missing rate limit. Users hit an endpoint with no throttle, and the system kept creating accounts, unchecked, unlimited, all night long.

$12k+ in Auth, compute and database charges. Not from AI. From a missing if statement. Time to spin up AI agent to negotiate refunds....

Here's the thing, this is going to become more common, not less.

We're in an era where you can build and ship an entire product in a weekend with Claude Code. I've done it. It's incredible. But speed creates blind spots.

When you're moving fast with AI-assisted development:

You ship faster than you secure. The feature works, the demo looks great, the app is live but did you add rate limiting? Auth checks? Input validation? Usage caps?

You trust the happy path. AI helps you build the thing that works. It doesn't always remind you to build the thing that prevents abuse.

Your bill is the error message. In the old days, you'd find bugs in QA. Now you find them in your billing dashboard on Monday morning.

Lessons learned:
- Rate limit everything. Every endpoint. Every user action. Day one.
- Set billing alerts at thresholds that make you uncomfortable, not just the max.
- Build the guardrails before you build the features.
- AI agent to negotiate refunds

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Day 2 of @shoptalk and the energy is still cranked to max. Humans + AI is everywhere on stage… but the real show-stealer? The branding.
The Mascots. The Events throwing punches. Booths with serious personality. Companies making their AI feel alive.

Last night’s eCommerce Fight For Charity had the whole crowd roaring, brands leaning all the way into soul and creativity. In a sea of smart AI products, the ones winning attention (and will win the market) are the ones with the most heart.

Branding your AI (and robots) matters. Give it a name. Give it a face. Give it personality.
Give it a name.
Give it a face.
Give it personality.

Standout moments:
- Meta doubling down: creators are the new storefront. Tools to collab faster, produce content quicker, and drive commerce straight from social. Brands building real partnerships now will own their audience instead of renting it.

- Starlife brought the physical wow factor with their teleoperated humanoid robots (Bella). Real human operators controlling robots on-site, turning physical retail/store tasks into remote work with judgment and personality. Humans + hardware = next-level presence on the floor.

- First-party data is the new gold. Every session hammered it, best data wins on personalization, AI training, and actually relevant experiences. Third-party dependent? You’re already behind.

- @PostscriptIO nailed the vibe at their Bodega booth with scratch tickets. Their Shopper AI sales agent is always on answering questions, recommending products, overcoming objections, and driving revenue 24/7 while staying on-brand and compliant.

- @usenash is quietly building the invisible infrastructure layer: AI agents handling last-mile logistics for 500+ fleets across 15+ countries. Real-time routing, dispatching & optimization for Walmart, 7-Eleven, Alto Pharmacy and more. Same-day delivery at scale, without the ops team chaos. 📦 Mahmoud Ghulman

- @intercom went full send on FIN, not just an AI feature, they rebranded the entire company around it. That’s a masterclass in pivoting around AI.

Two days in: AI isn’t replacing the human touch, it’s amplifying it.

But the brands packaging it with real personality, creativity, and soul?
Those are the ones we’ll remember.

Day 3, let’s keep the momentum going!

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Day 1 of @shoptalk and AI is running the show. AI search. AI agents. AI checkout. AI merchandising. AI-generated lifestyle imagery. AI-powered returns. AI direct mail. AI delivery. Every single booth, every keynote, every startup pitch, AI wasn't a track. It was THE track.

A few companies that caught my attention in the mix:

@goautolane | Building air traffic control for autonomous delivery. Smart curbside signs coordinating robots to self-driving vehicles at retail locations. Already at Simon Property Group malls, projecting 10M autonomous vehicles by 2030.

@redo_hq | Utah's start-up commerce tech wranglers. Turning every post-purchase moment into revenue. AI-powered returns, claims, and an agentic catalog managing the full customer lifecycle after checkout.

@getpostpilot | Love it when the AI meets the physical world and back to the basics! Launched AcquisitionAI, a self-learning engine automating direct mail prospecting across 200M consumers. HexClad seeing 5x+ incremental ROAS. AI is making physical mail smarter than most paid ads.

Day 1 and the message is clear, AI is shipping.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

@Benioff @ValaAfshar @adcock_brett Need to get a cowboy hat on!

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Just turned on @shoptalk mode. Excited to make new connections, reconnect with old ones, and trade notes around AI, commerce, and technology. Oh, and it's 95 degrees in Vegas. The hottest thing at Shoptalk might actually be the parking lot. 🤠

This year's theme says it all: Retail in the Age of AI.
That's not a future state. That's right now.

Here's what I'm watching closely from Shoptalk this year:

Personalization at scale: The brands winning aren't just recommending products, they're using AI to personalize the entire journey.

AI-powered merchandising: Inventory planning, demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, the back office is getting smarter faster than the front end.

Conversational commerce: Chat-based shopping is no longer a gimmick. AI agents that actually understand what you want, recommend the right product, and close the sale, that's the new storefront.

Content generation for catalog. Product descriptions, lifestyle imagery, A/B tested ad copy, all generated at scale. The brands producing content 10x faster are outpacing everyone in the feed.

The human + AI balance. The smartest retailers aren't replacing teams with AI. They're giving small teams AI superpowers. Lean operations, massive output.

If you're following along on LinkedIn like me, I'll be here breaking down the biggest takeaways.

Let's go!

Post Builder Notes:
- Image Created Nano Banana Pro.
- Wispr Flow text to voice
- Claude Code

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Amazon just acquired @rivr_tech, a robotics startup, and this one is worth paying attention to. Rivr has already been piloting with @shipveho in Austin. The setup: a dog-like robot on wheels that rides along with the delivery driver, then breaks off to carry the package to the doorstep. Up stairs. Across lawns. The last 100 yards.

This isn't replacing drivers. It's augmenting them.
And that distinction matters.

The last 100 yards is where last-mile delivery economics break down. The driver pulls up, parks, walks to the door, walks back, gets in, drives to the next stop. Multiply that by 150 stops a day. That's where the real cost lives.

Now imagine the driver pulls up and two robots roll off the van — each taking a package to a different door while the driver handles a third. Three deliveries in the time it used to take one.

That's not automation replacing humans
That's automation making humans three times more productive.

The unit economics shift completely:
- More deliveries per route
- Less time per stop
- Lower cost per package
- Driver still employed, just amplified

Amazon didn't buy Rivr for the robot.
hey bought Rivr for what the robot does to the math.

The companies figuring out human-AI collaboration — not human-AI replacement — are the ones that will scale fastest.

Robots that work alongside drivers. AI that works alongside teams. The augmentation model wins.

Curious how fast this scales. Austin is the pilot. But Amazon doesn't pilot things they don't plan to roll out everywhere.

What are your thoughts, does augmenting drivers with robotics change the game for last-mile delivery?

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

DoorDash just made the most underrated AI move of the year. They launched Dasher Tasks, paying their delivery drivers to complete short activities like photographing dishes, recording everyday tasks, and collecting real-world data for businesses. All on their own schedule.

On the surface, it looks like a gig economy expansion. A new way for Dashers to earn. But look deeper and this is a robotics and AI data play.

Every photo a Dasher takes. Every task they record. Every real-world interaction they capture. That's training data. The exact kind of structured, physical-world data you need to build autonomous systems.

Think about what DoorDash is actually building:
A massive, distributed workforce generating millions of real-world data points, photos of physical spaces, recordings of everyday tasks, ground-level business insights, all logged, all structured, all feeding into the next generation of physical intelligence.

Today, AI agents hire humans to do the task.

Tomorrow, the AI does the task itself, because the humans already taught it how.

This is the playbook:
Pay humans to do the work
Capture every data point
Train AI on the data
Automate what the humans taught you

It's the same strategy Tesla used with Autopilot.
Millions of human drivers unknowingly training the self-driving system that would eventually replace them.

DoorDash isn't just building a task marketplace.
They're building the training ground for physical intelligence and getting paid to collect the data.

Kind of genius. Kind of terrifying. Entirely inevitable.

The companies collecting the most real-world data right now will own the robotics future. DoorDash just figured out how to make it a product.

Pay attention to the data strategy, not the product announcement. The product is the wrapper. The data is the weapon.

[Andy Fang @andyfang]

Introducing Dasher Tasks

Dashers can now get paid to do general tasks. We think this will be huge for building the frontier of physical intelligence. Look forward to seeing where this goes!

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

AI can do a lot of things. But it can't replace community. Everyone's talking about what AI can build and automate. Fewer people are talking about what it should never replace. Community.

The brands winning right now aren't just the ones with the best AI tools.

They're the ones using AI to deepen human connection, not remove it.

Every brand says they want to build community.
Most of them mean they want a bigger email list.

But real community isn't transactional.
It's not a loyalty program or a discount code.
It's a relationship and relationships take work.

When you're building a product and landing your first customers, the instinct is to automate everything. AI can handle support tickets, personalize outreach, segment audiences, and write copy at scale. And it should.

But the brands that last?

They use AI to free up time then invest that time back into people.

That's the hospitality mindset.

My wife was a director of hospitality and now teaches hospitality at the university level. She's taught me something that most tech and DTC brands completely miss: hospitality isn't about the product. It's about how people feel when they interact with you.

Disneyland doesn't sell rides. Five-star resorts don't sell rooms. They sell experiences that make people feel seen, valued, and cared for.

AI can help you deliver that at scale but only if you design for connection, not just conversion.

Partnerships | AI can identify the right partners. Humans build the trust.

Evangelists | AI can surface your most engaged customers. Humans turn them into believers.

Connection | AI can personalize every touchpoint. Humans make it meaningful.

The smartest brands are using AI to be leaner, faster, and more intentional while doubling down on the human touch. Small, focused teams. A pod. A department. A tight crew using AI as a force multiplier, not a replacement for showing up.

You don't need a massive team to build real community.
You need a lean one that uses AI to handle the noise so they can focus on what matters.

Be lean. Be AI-powered. Be human.

Build something people actually want to be part of.
That's community.

Everything else is just an audience.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Happy 93rd birthday, Grandma! For her birthday, I got her an adventure for us to take a road trip together to San Francisco, her favorite city. But the real gift? A ride in a Waymo. No driver. No steering wheel. Nobody up front. Just a 93-year cruising through the city she loves in a car that drives itself.

I also used AI to create her a personalized birthday song with ElevenLabs and made a custom printed ticket for the trip from Nano Banana. Digital meets physical.

Pretty much everything I do every day, drive on a highway, check my phone, send an email, hop on a flight, ask AI a question was invented during her lifetime.

That got me thinking, my grandma has lived through more technological change than almost any generation in history.

10 groundbreaking technology advances in the past 93 years:

1. The Interstate Highway System: When she was born, there were no highways. Just dirt roads and two-lane routes. Now 48,000 miles of interstate connect every corner of this country. The very roads we'll be driving on didn't exist when she was young.

2. Commercial Aviation: She was born when flying was a luxury for the brave. Now we complain about WiFi at 35,000 feet.

3. Television: Her family's first TV had 3 channels in black and white. Now we stream 4K anything, anywhere, anytime.

4. Space Exploration: She watched the moon landing live on that little TV. Humans went from horse-drawn carriages to walking on the moon in her lifetime.

5. The Computer: From room-sized machines with vacuum tubes to a device in your pocket with a million times more processing power.

6. The Internet: The single most transformative invention of the modern era. She went from handwritten letters to email to FaceTime with her grandkids.

7. Smartphones: A telephone, camera, encyclopedia, map, bank, and music library all in one device. She remembers party lines and rotary phones.

8. DNA Discovery & Genomics: When she was born, we didn't even know what DNA looked like. Now we can map and edit the human genome.

9. Artificial Intelligence: Machines that can see, speak, write, create, compose music, generate art, and hold conversations. She's watched computers go from calculators to creative partners.

10. Self-Driving Cars: And soon she'll ride in a Waymo. No driver. No steering wheel. No one in the front seat. Just quiet, mind-bending technology carrying her through the city she loves.

It makes me wonder, what will I witness in my lifetime that I can't even imagine right now?

If the last 93 years are any indication, the next few decades will make today look like the Stone Age.

She's already excited for our road trip adventure. So am I.

Happy birthday, Grandma! The future isn't something to fear, it's something to ride into with a smile.

Post Builder Notes:
- Nano Banana Pro
- Eleven Labs
- Wispr Flow text to voice
- Claude Code

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Howdy. I've been posting on LinkedIn for 30 days.

I asked my AI agent to handle this one for me. It said "That's a human job, Wrangler."

Fair enough. But what a 30 days it's been.

I started showing up every day with one rule: treat every post like a field note. Real conversations. Real thoughts from the day. Not polished marketing, just what I'm actually seeing, building, and thinking about in real time.

I've been using AI for everything in the process.
Writing drafts in Claude Code.
Creating images with AI generators.
Tracking industry news.
Testing new tools every day.

Adding the AI Wrangler spin to everything has been fun. Taking what I'm learning and turning it into content that actually helps other builders. Thinking about adding video soon, becoming a full content creator, not just a poster.

The response has been incredible. Conversations I never expected. DMs from founders and builders. People sharing their own stories.

And I'm just getting started.

It doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be consistent.

30 days in. The habit is building. The momentum is real.

Now I just need to get a real life horse. Every AI Wrangler deserves one.

[Van Tucker @Van_Tucker]

Today @askOkara launched the "World's First AI CMO", Bold statement? Maybe. I took it for a quick spin, and honestly? Implementing AI agents is getting easier every single day.

Enter your website URL and instantly deploy a team of AI agents working to drive traffic and acquire users.

Okara has 7M+ views on their X launch.

From OpenClaw agents requiring technical setup to now this literal "click of a button" deployment, we're watching the democratization of AI marketing automation in real time.

Oh, and this post? It was written by Okara's AI CMO itself.

That's the meta moment right there, an AI CMO writing about its own launch. We're living in wild times.

What excites me most: This isn't just another AI tool. It's the shift toward autonomous marketing teams that actually execute, not just recommend.

Fun times ahead for anyone willing to embrace the AI-first marketing future!

Have you tried AI agents for your marketing yet? What's been your experience?

Post Builder Notes:
- Image Created Nano Banana Pro.
- Written by Okara