AI Won’t Replace You. People Who Learn It Will.

Everyone's worried AI is going to take their job. I think they're looking at it wrong.

A couple weeks ago, I was walking a friend through some of what AI can do. He was wrestling with a specific problem: how do you generate storyboard images that keep characters and continuity consistent from frame to frame? Today, OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.0, and one of its headline capabilities is exactly that: maintaining characters and visual continuity across multiple generations.

That kind of timing isn't an accident. It's the pattern.

Humans push the envelope. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the average person rarely traveled more than a few miles from home in their entire life. Today we keep people in orbit full-time, and SpaceX is building toward Mars. Work didn't disappear along the way. What we're capable of accomplishing expanded. AI is the next chapter of that same story.

The people who get “replaced” won't be replaced by AI. They'll be replaced by people willing to learn it. People who automate the monotony of their day and pour that reclaimed time back into creativity, judgment, and imagination.

I recently left a corporate role and got a front-row view of how slowly large organizations move on change, especially AI. Access was limited. Pace was limited. Since launching my own consulting practice, I've been able to expand in ways I couldn't when I was inside the tanker, and I can see directions things are going that I simply couldn't see before.

Two examples of what's already possible

Cal AI, an image-based calorie-tracking app built largely on AI, was acquired by MyFitnessPal earlier this year. Less than two years old, founded by two high school students, and reportedly generating tens of millions in annual revenue by the time of the sale.

Closer to the ground: a leader at one company was quoted several hundred thousand dollars for a SaaS solution to a specific problem. Another leader, aware of what AI tools can do, built a working internal version, with only the features they actually needed, in under a month for less than $8K. Let that sink in.

We have hundreds, maybe thousands, of small problems inside our businesses where a purpose-built tool would serve us better than anything off the shelf. We're in a moment where we no longer have to bend our processes to fit the available tools. We can build tools that fit our processes, and protect the competitive edge those processes create, for a fraction of what it used to cost.

This is what I help businesses figure out: where AI can actually move the needle, and how to build or adopt the right tools without getting sold things they don't need.