The 8 AI Skills That Will Separate Winners From Losers in 2025

In 2025, the winners won't be the marketers, the developers, or the designers; there'll be AI generalists who can do it all. I know because I've done it. Over the past two years, I've made almost $4 million by mastering a specific set of AI skills that have turned me into a one-person army.

In this video, I'll show you why AI generalists will dominate every industry in the coming years, the eight AI skills that anyone can learn to become one, and exactly how to master these skills yourself, even if you're starting from zero. This video isn't just another "learn AI" guide; it's your blueprint to becoming unstoppable in 2025 and beyond. Before we get into things, if you are new to the channel and don't know who I am, my name is Le Motley, and I've been an entrepreneur for the past six years, the past two of which have been fully focused on building AI businesses.

For me, going all-in on AI has completely changed my life. So on this channel, I help others understand the AI opportunity and make more money from it by sharing my learnings from building my company, Morningside, into a billion-dollar AI business. If you want to learn more about me and my story, you can check out my "My Story" video, which I'll put in the description below.

But without further ado, let's get into the eight AI skills you need to crush in 2025 and beyond. To understand how to be one of the few winners in 2025, regardless of your career path, you need to understand the dynamics of the period that we're entering into. Over the coming decade, the job market and society itself will be completely transformed by AI and automation.

According to McKinsey's 2023 research, AI could automate up to 50% of the current work activities by 2030, and similarly, Bain's research shows that up to 80% of workers will face wage stagnation or displacement by 2030 due to AI and automation. So in this era of radical transformation, how can you develop a winning strategy for your career to navigate through these uncharted waters? Believe it or not, evolutionary biology actually holds a lot of the answers we're looking for here.

As Darwin said, "It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it's the one that's the most adaptable to change. " So during periods of massive environmental change, like this rocky period that humanity is entering over the next decade and beyond, the most adaptable organisms survive best. Nature gives us two distinct strategies for adapting: we have specialists, and we have generalists.

Now give me a sec; I will bring this back around, but stick with me, okay? So consider the giant panda. It's evolved over millions of years to eat only bamboo, with a thumb that's specifically designed to strip the bamboo leaves off the bamboo.

Now, in stable times, this specialization is actually incredibly successful. There's a lot of bamboo they can tap into as a food source, right? But if something happens to the bamboo forests, these pandas basically face extinction because they can't adapt to other food sources; they are overly dependent on their specialization.

Now, if you look at something like the raccoon, it can eat almost anything, live almost anywhere, and adapt to new environments rapidly. When their habitat and environment change—say there's billions of upright apes walking around, driving SUVs, and living in houses—raccoons don't just survive; they've actually thrived. The most dramatic example of this specialist-versus-generalist pattern playing out is over 66 million years ago when a big asteroid hit Earth and wiped out all the dinosaurs.

It wasn't the T. rex that survived; it wasn't these specialized marine reptiles or flying pterosaurs—these incredibly specialized and beautiful creatures that were perfectly adapted to their niches. They were wiped out almost overnight.

Who survived? It was the small and adaptable mammals—our ancient ancestors. They weren't the strongest or the most specialized; they were generalists who could eat anything, live anywhere, and quickly adapt to changing conditions in their environment.

We're witnessing a similar extinction-level event in the job market right now, and just like the dinosaurs, there's a gigantic meteor coming right for us. In today's world, thankfully, we are not competing for physical survival; we're competing for economic and professional survival. Just as environmental changes once determined which species thrived, technological changes are now determining which careers and skills will prosper.

In this competition for economic survival, the specialists are the corporate lawyers who spent years mastering contract law, or the radiologists who dedicated a decade to reading medical images, or these software developers who invested years in learning a specific programming language. For the past 80 years, specialization like this has been the safest career strategy; you get to go deep in one area and become irreplaceable, enjoying a stable and prosperous career, right? But that equation is being flipped on its head over the coming decades.

As AI systems are now matching or exceeding specialist performance in countless different fields, they are diagnosing diseases as accurately as doctors, reviewing legal documents faster than lawyers, and writing code better and faster than many developers. And this is just the beginning; these AI capabilities are literally doubling every six months. So it's pretty safe to say that no career is safe over the next 10 years.

So we know what a specialist is, but what does an adaptable generalist look like in today's world? These modern-day generalists are individuals who harness AI to acquire the capabilities of multiple different specialists simultaneously. While these AI generalists may not match the absolute peak performance of true specialists right now, they can very quickly achieve up to.

. . 80% of the capabilities of specialists across multiple different domains in specialization.

So, instead of spending a decade mastering just one skill, these AI generalists can become proficient in new specializations in literally weeks. They’re using image generation to create professional artwork, AI app builders to create software, and language models to write in any style or format they want. They’re basically acquiring these new powers through AI, allowing them to do more with less effort across many different fields.

We’ll get to what these powers are exactly in a minute, but just a little bit longer—you need to stick with me. The potential of these AI generalists is so profound that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently shared that among his tech CEO friends, they’re all taking bets on when we’ll see the first one-person billion-dollar company. That’s something that would have been unimaginable without AI, according to them.

This is because these AI generalists are like modern-day Leonardo da Vinci, and we’re essentially in a digital Renaissance right now. Just as Da Vinci was able to combine both art and engineering and anatomy and mathematics to see connections that others of his time in the Renaissance missed, today’s generalists use AI to bring multiple disciplines together and create value in entirely new ways that weren’t possible before. The tools at our disposal these days would seem like complete magic to Leonardo da Vinci, and what took him basically years to master, we can now learn in weeks.

What used to require teams of specialists, you can now do alone with AI, and what once would have cost millions in equipment and staff, people can now achieve from their laptop on their own. So, the path to thriving in 2025 and beyond isn’t through deeper specialization; it’s through becoming an AI generalist who has the power of entire departments of business at their fingertips. This requires mastering four fundamental powers in the AI age, each unlocked by a specific set of skills that anyone can learn—which we’re going to jump into in a second.

It may seem daunting to have to pick up all these skills, but learning them is what it’s actually going to take to thrive in the AI age. But don’t just take it from me; take it from Peter Thiel and the advice that he gave to Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel is an absolute legend in the tech space, multibillionaire, etc.

So, take a listen to this: I You can learn this skill and all of the others rapidly with a couple of resources that I've put together for you. Building your own custom tools is really just the start of software; the real power comes from automating repetitive work. Think about all the repetitive work that you do every day.

You've got answering similar emails, scheduling meetings, creating social posts, managing tasks, and updating spreadsheets. The old way was to either just do all of the stuff yourself or to pay someone and hire a virtual assistant to do it for you, which can be both expensive and time-consuming. The world-famous investor philosopher Naval Ravikant explains that success in the modern world comes down to leverage: ways to multiply your effort without multiplying the time you put in.

Traditionally, there are three forms of leverage: you have labor, which is hiring people; you have capital, which is using money; and you have products with marginal costs of replication, which he puts down to being as code or as content. This means that with a piece of code or software, once you create it, replicating that out to thousands or millions of users basically costs nothing to reach another user. The same thing goes for content, because once I've created this video, it doesn't cost me anything extra in terms of effort for it to be shown to one or more or thousands more people.

The creation of AI agents is a completely new form of leverage that essentially combines code leverage and labor leverage into something that's entirely new. You're essentially creating digital workers that you can spawn instantly for a fraction of the cost of a human, and they can work for you 24/7 with no complaints. Creating your own AI agents is getting easier and easier every day.

I've actually got an entire one-hour long special on AI agents being released very shortly after this video is posted, so if you aren't already subscribed, I highly recommend you sub for that because I put so much work into it, and it's going to cover all of the AI agent information you need to know to succeed in the coming decade. But building and managing AI agents is just one part of the power to automate. The other half is AI-based workflow automation, which involves creating systems that connect your tools and handle routine tasks for you automatically and in the background.

When you combine both of these, you can build entire automated systems that will basically do your job or run your business while you sleep. The future that lies ahead belongs to the people who can create and deploy these AI workers because it's like having a superpower where you can multiply yourself through technology. In order to gain this power of automation, you need to master the following skills: firstly, no-code AI agent development—so that's using things like OpenAI GPTs and Relevance AI to create these digital workers; secondly, no-code AI workflow automation—so connecting tools and building workflows using Zapier or Make.

com; and third, of course, is prompt engineering—being able to craft powerful prompts. The best way to do that is using tools like Prompt Mythus, which is my personal favorite. We have API Integrations, which is understanding how all of these automations can connect together, and this has become a lot easier when you've mastered tools like Postman.

All of these skills combined will allow you to build sophisticated automated systems that basically work for you 24/7, and I've got some incredible free resources for you to learn all of these very rapidly to share with you at the end of the video. Think about all of the content that a modern business or a creator needs. You need designs, you need videos, you need music, you need writing— even simple projects need basically professional-grade content to stand out these days.

The old way was either to learn these complex creative tools yourself or to hire expensive freelancers or agencies to make this stuff for you. A single video ad or a new ad campaign could cost thousands of dollars to get done with a creative agency or something. Now, AI creative tools allow you to generate professional content in minutes.

As Kevin Kelly said, the printing press democratized knowledge, the camera democratized images, and AI is democratizing creativity itself. Whether you are an employee or a business owner, knowing how to use these creative AI tools and the skills to use them appropriately and effectively makes you so much more valuable. Because if you need a logo, you can use MidJourney to create one for you in a few seconds.

If you want a professional-looking video, you have Runway AI that can generate it in seconds. If you want your own music tracks, there are apps like SUO, which create original songs in any style you want. And if you're struggling with video editing, you can use the script and its AI features to handle all sorts of tasks automatically.

With these kinds of tools available, you're only limited by your prompting ability and your creativity in order to create new works of art. I trained my own AI image generation model on a platform called Replicate in order to create pictures of me in any pose for my thumbnails. I used to have to mess around with taking new photos pretty often, and now my graphic design team can just generate hundreds of new images of me in any pose they want for whatever video we're doing.

So it's so much better for both me and for them. These kinds of AI tools aren't just faster; they're giving us creative capabilities that would have seemed impossible to us just a year ago. And like everything else in the AI space, they’re.

. . Improving every single month, so to gain the power of creation as an AI generalist, you need to cultivate four skills.

Firstly, AI content generation: that's using tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Replicate for your images; Runway AI for generating videos; and creating custom music with apps like Soundraw. The second skill is AI editing and enhancement, which involves polishing content with tools like Descript and Opus. The stuff that comes out of these AI content generators is typically not really out of the box; you need help to buff them up into shape in order to get the most value out of them.

Therefore, AI-assisted video and photo editing software is also a really important area to brush up on your skills. Regardless of your career path, having the powers of a creative agency at your fingertips makes you insanely valuable. Success in 2025 and beyond will go to those who can connect with others, those who can successfully build an audience, and this ability to stand out from the crowd isn't just optional anymore; it's actually a basic need for survival in the modern world.

Building a following used to be reserved for natural writers or charismatic personalities, but AI has changed everything on this front. Right now, basically anyone can build a personal brand through text-based content like Twitter and LinkedIn or through video here on YouTube. At the end of the day, building a following always comes back to having interesting ideas, communicating them clearly, and doing this requires the skill of writing.

As David McCullough says, "Writing is thinking; to write well is to think clearly. " That's why it's so hard, but thankfully today's AI tools make writing easier than ever for people. They don't need to replace your thinking; they just kind of amplify it.

They help you explore your ideas faster, structure your arguments better, and express your thoughts more clearly. I've experienced this firsthand—the moment I started building my personal brand here on YouTube two years ago, my success took off. I've got 270,000 subscribers and I've made millions of dollars, all in less than two years, because I was able to write my ideas down clearly and then communicate them through video here on YouTube.

I use AI heavily when doing this writing process, to throw ideas together and basically do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. While it is still me writing, I'm definitely being helped in doing a lot of the heavy lifting, thanks to AI. So, long story short, without a personal brand, you will fade into the background in 2025 and beyond, while others rise and capture all the opportunities—it's really that simple.

To gain this power of connection, you only need one core skill, and that's AI-enhanced writing, using tools like Claude by Anthropic to write better and write faster, helping you reach more people with the same amount of work. You can also use your AI automation skills from Power Automate to create content repurposing systems, allowing you to amplify the impact of your writing by reaching more people with the same set of ideas. With that simple example, you start to see how these four powers—building, automating, creating, and connecting—all work together.

Each one amplifies the others, and if you can master them all, then you'll become unstoppable in 2025 and beyond. Normally, learning all these skills individually would take months or years. That's why I've put together a comprehensive resource guide specifically for becoming an AI generalist.

I've personally spent thousands of hours testing different tools, strategies, and trying to make money and build businesses. I've distilled everything I've learned over the past two years into a clear roadmap for mastering each of these four powers and the eight skills that come with them. You can access this roadmap completely free in my Skill Community, which will be the first link in the description.

Then, you can head to the YouTube resources section to find this video, and in that post will be a link to the roadmap, which covers the exact tools I use for each power that I've covered in this video: the best free step-by-step guides, YouTube videos, and resources to master these skills quickly. I've also included real examples of how I've used these skills to make millions of dollars online. As you go through 2025, remember what we learned from Darwin: it's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most adaptable to change.

I've just given you the blueprint to maximizing your adaptability in 2025 and beyond as an AI generalist, and I explained the theory behind why it will dominate the entire next decade. AI is creating a new class of people that are better adapted to this digital age, and the question for you now is: will you be one of them? So, that is all for the video, guys.

If you want to, please leave a like on the video if you got something out of it. Also, if you want to subscribe to the channel to stay up to date on how to use the AI opportunity to get the most out of life over the coming next few years and decades, that's what this channel is all about—sharing my learnings on my journey as well. So, if you haven't already, go down there, do all that fun stuff, and I'm going to put a video up here.

Breaking down some of the most important lessons for learning and building AI agents. Let me know your thoughts down below in the comments, and I will see you inside the free school community.