Stacked Intelligence: Less Magic, More Architecture.

By: Travis Fleisher

The Problem with “One-Tool” Thinking

Over the past year, we’ve all seen the explosion of AI tools that promise to do everything: write your emails, analyze your data, design your slides, narrate your video. And while a lot of that is technically true, the reality is that no single tool is actually good at all of it.

That’s not a knock on the tools. It’s a reflection of how intelligence works. You don’t expect your copywriter to also be your data analyst and your video editor. So why expect that from AI?

The real shift happens when you stop trying to do everything with one tool, and instead start thinking like a systems builder.

What Is Stacked Intelligence?

Stacked intelligence is a simple idea: use multiple AI tools in a chain, each doing the thing it does best. You pass work from one to the next like a baton. One extracts insights. One turns them into a narrative. One brings that narrative to life.

Individually, these tools are useful. Together, they’re transformative.

It’s not about automation. It’s about orchestration. You’re no longer treating AI like a vending machine, you’re treating it like a creative team.

Why It Matters

Most people still treat AI like a clever assistant. Something you prompt when you need to summarize an article, generate an image, or clean up some copy.

That’s fine for small tasks.

But when you’re building something larger—a strategy deck, a brand pitch, a product launch—you need more than a single interaction. You need a process. That’s where stacked intelligence becomes essential.

Instead of hunting for the one perfect app, you start thinking in layers: What’s the tool for insight? What’s the tool for storytelling? What’s the tool for delivery?

The more intentional you are about the handoff between those layers, the more powerful the outcome becomes.

The problem is, getting to that stack takes work. The AI landscape is overwhelming by design. Every week, there’s a new “best” tool, a promising beta, or a slick demo video that looks great until you hit a paywall, run into copyright limitations, or discover the tool isn’t even live. You waste time signing up for free trials, parsing vague feature lists, and trying to figure out if a tool actually solves your problem—or just creates new ones.

That’s why we built ToolCurator.ai. It’s designed to cut through the noise and help you identify the best tools for your workflow, based on what you actually want to accomplish. Whether you're building a content pipeline, designing a pitch, or launching a campaign, ToolCurator synthesizes the top options so you can spend less time searching and more time building.

Stacked intelligence works. Finding the right stack shouldn’t be the hard part.

A Real-World Example: Copilot → Gamma → Lumen5

Recently, I had to build a sponsorship pitch for a fast-growing women’s sports organization. The goal was to show a potential partner in the beauty and personal care space why this audience was such a strong fit.

I started with a spreadsheet—just raw data on fan segments and spending patterns. I used an AI assistant inside a spreadsheet platform to surface insights: which groups over-indexed on personal care purchases, how their average spend compared to the general population, and which communities had the strongest overlap with the partner's values.

Once I had the insights, I jumped into a presentation builder powered by generative AI. I didn’t worry about formatting. I just focused on structure. Within minutes, the tool gave me a deck that looked like it came out of a creative agency.

To make the pitch even more engaging, I took the script and ran it through a video generation platform. It automatically created a short video—stock footage, branded text, music, voiceover—the works. The end result was a complete pitch, told across data, slides, and video, built in less than an hour without ever opening traditional design or editing software.

None of the tools could have done that alone. But stacked together, they became a force multiplier.

Where This Is Headed

This approach isn’t just about building decks or campaigns. It reflects a broader shift in how we work with AI.

We’re moving past the “magic button” phase. AI isn’t just a productivity trick anymore. It’s becoming an ecosystem, and ecosystems require coordination.

Stacked intelligence is the architecture behind that coordination. It’s how you turn isolated capabilities into a workflow. It’s how you move from asking AI to do a task, to using AI to drive an outcome.

How to Start

You don’t need to know every tool. You just need to map your own process.

What’s something you already do regularly—create a proposal, analyze a dataset, build a presentation? Break it into three parts: insight, structure, and presentation.

Now ask: which tools help me do each part faster, better, or more creatively?

That’s your stack.

Once you start thinking that way, the AI landscape gets a lot less overwhelming. You stop looking for the one app that does it all and start building a system that fits your workflow.

Final Thought

AI isn’t going to replace you. But someone who knows how to stack the right tools, in the right order, just might.

Stacked intelligence isn’t about replacing expertise—it’s about amplifying it. It’s how individual creators start working like full teams. And it’s how we stop using AI just to save time, and start using it to make better things.

 Travis