Focus on the idea. Leave the execution to us.

We’re approaching the 200th anniversary of the first photo ever taken. And it’s worth remembering — before that first photo was taken in French wine country on some sunny day of 1827 —how much value paintings once had as not just artistic expressions, but literally one of the few reliable ways to know what something looked like without seeing it yourself.

Royals had to know who they were marrying before travelling a continent. Newly discovered plants and animals had to be documented. Trade goods from a burgeoning global economy had to be marketed across the world!

Photos changed that. What once required a master drawer, painter, or etcher, now just required a device.

It also changed the way artists expressed themselves. Fifty years after the first photograph, impressionism emerged — works that deliberately rejected the ‘photo’ realism of the old masters and focused more on the ultimate goal of artwork: to express an idea, even if that expression has less to do with what a subject actually looks like in real life.

With tactile strokes and blurry forms, Monet’s Water Lilies do not look photo-realistic, certainly not in the way the Dutch Golden Age artists depicted forests, sunlight, and dinner spreads with stunning realism. And yet, Monet’s Water Lilies steal the hearts of thousands of viewers every day because they conjure something greater than just imitation — they’re filled with deep, beautiful feelings of tranquility, life, and memory.

Now, I’m no artist. I can’t draw and my sense of color is atrocious.

But I was still shocked to see agents become more and more compelling in conversation — just flattering enough, just assertive enough — to accomplish real goals. Agents are achieving what once required inordinate amounts of human effort; doing to a business team what, once upon a time, the photograph did to thousands of painters.

As a humble operator, I thought that repetitive effort was my edge! I did the pitches, the thoughtful follow-ups, the selling. I was the one who spent hundreds of hours cold-calling sources for journalism gigs in college; worked through jungle-dense email threads at startups to gain a green light from some decision maker.

Here I was, like some artisan portrait artist in the 1840s witnessing a photograph for the first time, watching technology do in minutes what I do in hours, weeks even.

But, Monet didn’t care much about competing with the camera, did he? His brush expressed ideas that the camera could never capture on its own.

(And as the great wheel of media turns, 200 years later, the camera expresses ideas that no AI-generated image could ever touch!)

While I’m also definitely no Monet, I do think a lot about how some of the greatest works of oil on canvas emerged only after the camera freed artists from comparisons to the real world.

Because once a realistic representation becomes commodified as a photo or a hyper-real AI conversation, it’s not impressive anymore. (In fact, it might just be slop if it’s built around an unimpressive idea.)

Generate a thousand emails, or cold call a thousand people in one hour? Now anyone can do that with the right agent.

The aspect that doesn’t change, whether in art or business, is the expression. Are you saying something interesting, something valuable? Do people care? Alma Thomas, Rothko, Picasso — their works are breathtaking, and we have them because, two hundred years ago, photorealistic art stopped mattering.

So what happens for all of us business operators when we’re not judged by the busywork anymore? When it’s less about how many phone calls we can make or emails we can respond to, and more about what we actually have to say?

Well, just like the impressionists, abstract expressionists, and all the modern artists, we get to focus on what matters most: the ideas. Which is a good thing.

That’s why if you have any kind of business goal in the real world — people to convince, meetings to book, deals to sign — Treater talks to the world across hundreds of thousands of touchpoints every month to bring your goals to life. Phone calls, emails, texts, it doesn’t matter: Treater finds the way to win.

You don’t need to worry about the agents coming off as polished or charming. You don’t need to wonder about the right audience, time, place, or medium. That’s busywork, and that’s our job. Bring your vision to our platform, and our agents bring the execution.

So while we are not nearly as cool as transcendent artists painting water lilies in France, we take some solace in how that first photograph taken 200 years ago (titled “Point de vue du Gras”) does not reside in Paris, France, or even Europe! The photograph’s home is an art museum at UT Austin in Texas — acquired in the 1960s by the booming post-war economy of America. A good Texas businessman (like my co-founder Ayaz), after all, always appreciates a daring vision.

Point de vue du Gras, Nicéphore Niépce, 1827, Harry Ransom Center

And if you have a daring vision of your own? Book a demo right here.