# Ghostwriter Who Lost All His Clients to AI Pivots to Selling AI-Powered "Second Brain" Systems

_General · published 2026-05-21_

David Johnson-Igra, a ghostwriter who built his career crafting content for executives at Amazon, a16z, Meta, GitHub, and OpenAI, lost every one of his clients within weeks of Anthropic's Claude 3 Opus release in early 2025. While he stops short of attributing the exodus definitively to that model, the timing — and the rapid spread of AI writing tools in his tech-executive client base — prompted him to fundamentally rethink his business.

Rather than returning to selling content deliverables, Johnson-Igra's firm Scribes Consulting now builds custom AI-powered "second brain" systems for executives. Each system pairs a knowledge graph (built in Obsidian) with an LLM of the client's choice, ingesting past content, interviews, and performance data to surface strategic insights and accelerate drafting. The client owns the system; Johnson-Igra provides the expertise to run it. The model-agnostic setup also avoids vendor lock-in — a deliberate hedge in a fast-moving AI landscape.

## Sources
- [fortune.com](https://fortune.com/2026/05/18/ai-ghostwriting-clients-llms-claude/)
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