Ann Marie Almariei Sees the Future From the Inside

Ann Marie Almariei — known to friends and colleagues as AMA — changes her hair when she enters a new chapter.

Purple marked her move away from the agency world. Then came blue, a Van Gogh mix of yellows and greens, and bright pink while she was building a fintech startup.

“I think it was about giving myself permission to be myself,” AMA says.

The pink era proved unexpectedly useful. Walking into a conference for law-firm owners and estate-planning professionals with bright pink hair made her impossible to miss – and, she was surprised to note, it made people more willing to approach her.

“They realized I was a risk-taker,” she remembers.

AMA brought a prototype to the conference, walking into a bar after sessions and asking firm owners if they wanted to see the app she was building. She left with “more than 50 collaborative relationships with law firms” and evidence that there might be something worth building.

Today her hair is aptly named Oil Slick, not just to reflect the rising trend among celebrity hair stylists, but as an embodiment of the AI era. It’s dark and ominous until the light hits it, the angle changes, and the colors emerge. She sees that tension in AI, too, where the first impression can obscure how much nuance sits underneath.

It’s a pattern that reaches well beyond appearance. Across social media, fintech, Web3, community building and now AI, AMA has repeatedly gone toward whatever was emerging fastest. She goes beyond tool mastery, insisting on understanding what the shift makes possible and what people can do with it.

At Sageworx, that instinct sits at the intersection of creative direction, AI system design and community strategy. Her experience includes work with iconic brands, years inside traditional ad agencies and VaynerMedia, and the operating experience of becoming a founder herself.

AMA once had her career mapped out.

“I knew I wanted to be a creative director. I knew I wanted to win awards and do great work,” she says. “But I didn’t know until I was about 10 years into my career that I wanted more than to just be a creative.”

In the traditional agency structure, the boundaries were clear. Strategists strategized. Account people handled the account. Creatives received the problem after major decisions had already been made.

There’s very little AMA dislikes more than being handed a problem and its proposed execution at the same time. “I felt that the campaign was bigger than just a headline and a visual. I wanted it to be a bigger solution to a problem.”

At the time, crossing those boundaries could earn a wrist slap. Even welcoming an idea from someone outside the creative department challenged the hierarchy.

By then, AMA had already built a substantial career inside that model. Her agency career included major-brand work for Coca-Cola and Samsung and award-winning creative for Microsoft, including leading the launch of Xbox Live. She had succeeded within the traditional creative track before she began questioning how narrowly that track was defined.

Then AMA moved to VaynerMedia and, for the first time, worked outside the creative department. “I had to untrain myself,” she says. From there, she learned, “The org chart is a fiction. The work doesn't care what your title is.”

Becoming a founder widened the lens again. After years working with Fortune 500 brands, AMA began working more closely with founders and startups, connecting to clients not only as a creative but as someone who had built a business herself.

Her rule was simple:

"Anyone can bring a good idea to the table. And sometimes that idea wouldn't have happened without the collaborative riffing and builds that happen in real time." Put enough smart people in a room without making them protect their lanes and “it’s amazing what you can accomplish.”

AMA has lived through enough platform shifts to recognize the feeling of another arriving. Social media forced brands to move from pushing messages at consumers toward a dialogue with them. AI feels similar, except the ground is moving much faster.

“With AI, we don’t know what the way is yet because it changes so much,” she says.

That makes AMA skeptical of both resistance and overcommitment. A company can’t ignore AI, but it also can’t spend hundreds of thousands of dollars rebuilding itself around a system that may be outdated a month later.

Her answer is experimentation without surrendering judgment.

For AMA, AI is excellent at clearing away the work surrounding the idea. “Use it to get all the time-intensive stuff out of the way”: competitive analysis, research and insights that give experienced people a better place to begin. And faster research does not take the authority away from those doing the imaginative work.

“AI is not going to be the creative that comes up with the big idea,” AMA says. The capable creative will take what the system produces and “reshape it and reinvent it into something new.”

The tools have placed a greater value on speed. But now taste is at a premium.

“I despise these workflows where it’s start-to-finish automated,” AMA explains, and simply slotting a human somewhere isn’t enough.

A brand can define its voice, identify a trending topic and automate a LinkedIn post. But if 50 other people can produce the same thing, the efficiency has created the opposite of thought leadership.

For AMA, the human contribution starts much earlier, because “the input that you give it is what’s going to drive the output.”

She spends time building accurate context before asking the model for anything. From there, she treats the exchange more like a working session than a handoff. A response might reveal that an angle doesn’t hold up, or send her back to strengthen the thinking behind it.

Then she herself makes the call.

“Any output that you get needs to reflect you, whether you’re a strategist or a creative or a founder of a company,” she says. “It needs to reflect your values, your business, and your ethos.”

Her conclusion is simple: “The outputs are our responsibility and our opportunity to own.”

When someone asks AMA which platform they should use, she leads with curiosity: What are you trying to solve?

Then, “Understand where there are opportunities to have AI help you do something better, more detailed, faster.”

After that, the tool can enter the conversation, since “the tools change every day. The questions don’t.”

AMA builds what she calls “a brain”: a portable context repository containing the knowledge she needs to bring with her from one AI system to the next, “so you can evolve along with the tools.” Rather than building everything around one model, she maintains organized information she can carry between systems as they improve, disappear or get replaced.

It’s no use to try to predict which platform or model will stick around the longest. It’s an instinct AMA shares with the rest of Sageworx: protect the knowledge and judgment behind the work, even as the tools around it change.

The short lifespan of these tools makes those experimenting with them invaluable. When AMA wants to understand what is working now, she still knows where she looks first:

“I tend to trust the humans more than I trust the LLMs.”

VaynerMedia taught AMA what becomes possible when those humans are learning together.

At one point, its teams were running up to five major social platforms across 72 clients. If a text post suddenly gained traction for one brand, other teams could begin experimenting with the same signal that day. AMA could watch an emerging behavior play out at a scale no individual account could provide.

“The more people that you have giving you signal and giving you direction helps you make decisions and helps you be curious.”

AI can gather intelligence from across the places marketers already look for insight – from search and competitive data to the real-time conversations happening on Reddit. It cannot gather the lived experience required to interpret it.

For the industry veterans AMA sees approaching AI with trepidation, that gap should be reassuring rather than threatening. “Experience plus AI is a superpower,” she argues. “The human experience is about to compound, not erode.”

The same principle drew her to Sageworx.

“The Sageworx collective is made up of phenomenal creative people and strategists and producers,” she says. People test ideas in Slack, challenge one another, break things apart and rebuild them. “Sageworx is more of a community than a collective. We come together to be curious.”

AMA rarely enters a new space without building a door for somebody else.

During the rise of Web3, she kept seeing Discord communities ask moderators to work for free, or for wages that varied wildly depending on where they lived.

So she started Angry Mods.

Members shared what they earned and where they lived. AMA turned that information back into a resource the community could use to understand how their compensation compared across countries.

“I felt responsible to these young professionals who were trying to make a living and just being taken advantage of,” she says.

She recognizes the same responsibility now among experienced advertising and marketing professionals confronting AI. Some are intimidated by the technology. AMA sees people with years of judgment, emotional intelligence and lived experience that a model cannot manufacture.

She’s started coaching business colleagues one at a time, with the possibility of eventually expanding that work into courses, webinars or other resources.

“My pet project is always, ‘How do I bring people in with me?’” she says. “I need to upskill first. I need to exist. I need to acclimate, and then help everybody else do the same.”

The platforms change along with the tools – and the hair. AMA’s methodology withstands every cultural shift. She leads the way, dives in until she understands the system inside-out, and then turns around to make sure the people behind her have a way in too.

To follow AMA’s work, visit her portfolio, connect with her on LinkedIn, or reach out through Sageworx.