In an industry where technology often moves faster than the corporate structures that support it, the energy sector has remained notoriously traditional. While engineering feats push the boundaries of what is possible, the way companies sell, market, and grow has often stayed rooted in local, person-to-person networks.
Michael Hudson, founder and CEO of Project 54, is bridging this gap. By rethinking how technical expertise and human connection scale in a digital-first world, he is helping energy firms transition from regional players to international leaders.
Solving the Regional Trap in Energy Sales
For many energy companies, the most significant hurdle isn’t the quality of their service, but the limitation of traditional sales models. Michael observed that reliance on manual, regional approaches restricted firms to a small, local pool of suppliers and clients.
Project 54 was built to dismantle these barriers through three core pillars:
- Increasing Digital Presence: Michael enables companies to move beyond local boundaries, providing them with the global visibility needed to secure not only domestic but also international contracts.
- Accelerating Sales Cycles: The energy industry is known for slow, paperwork-heavy processes. Michael utilizes AI to handle the “grunt work” of proposals and lead qualification, allowing sales cycles to move faster than conventional human hours allow.
- Global Sourcing: By expanding a company’s digital reach, Project 54 helps them find more cost-effective partners and a greater variety of contracts worldwide.
“We aim to position companies so that they can profit from now but also evolve effectively to the future,” Michael explains.
AI-First but Human-Led
At Project 54, “AI-First” does not mean replacing the workforce; it means cognitive offloading. Michael’s philosophy is to delegate mundane, time-consuming tasks what he calls “the grind” to AI. This ensures that human team members don’t burn their creative or analytical energy on low-value tasks.
“Strategy without systems doesn’t scale,” Michael notes. However, he warns against the modern trend of total AI-dependence, where bots lead the entire process. Instead, Project 54 builds automation systems that are strictly led by humans.
In this model:
- A human with deep industry knowledge constantly monitors AI templates.
- Human oversight ensures that technical energy jargon is translated into credible, trust-building stories for clients.
- A human is reinserted entirely into the final closing process.
As Michael emphasizes, at the end of the day, people prefer to buy from people, not chatbots or generic AI content.
Leadership: From Film Sets to First Principles
Michael’s unique leadership style is an evolution of his background in the film industry. Directing a film requires a fluid ability to manage diverse mentalities, from the highly creative, abstract minds of actors to the analytical, time-sensitive demands of producers, executives and stakeholders.
He has brought this adaptability to Project 54, managing a lean, remote team that spans time zones from the Americas to Asia, Africa and Europe. To keep this global team aligned and high-performing, Michael relies on a “First Principles” philosophy:
- Boiling Down to the Core: For every high-stakes decision, Michael asks: “What is the first principle we are trying to achieve?” This helps the team cut through the “noise” and focus only on what is necessary.
- Radical Transparency: Michael fosters a culture of honest and open feedback. Drawing from the cinema world, criticism at Project 54 is viewed as a positive input that adds strength to the final product.
- Extreme Ownership: Every employee, intern, and contractor is encouraged to take full responsibility for their work, with the rest of the team acting as expert advisors rather than micro-managers.
Preparing for the Saturation Shift
Looking ahead, Michael predicts a major pivot in B2B marketing. He anticipates that as the digital world becomes saturated with automated and AI-generated content, audiences will develop “AI fatigue”.
“People will start looking for ‘realisms’ and a genuine human connection,” Michael predicts. While the demand for energy from nuclear to renewables, gas and oil will see “huge growth” due to the needs of AI and a growing population, the companies that thrive will be those that remain credible and respectable in a sea of automated noise.
Project 54 is positioning its clients for this shift now by focusing on expertise, trust, and human-centric systems.
“In an era of digital saturation, the ultimate competitive advantage isn’t just about being the fastest or the most automated; it’s about being the most human and the most credible in a world that is increasingly losing its sense of realism.”
