The Future Of Work (How To Become AI-First)

The top AI model is now smarter than 85% of humans. By the end of 2026, it will be smarter than 99. 9% of humans.

And you think you will still have a job? That's a post from David Patterson on X and Elon Musk actually replied to this with roughly correct. Now, let me overload your brain for a moment because the CEO of Fiverr, Micah Kaufman, sent out an email last month to his team.

So here's the first part of it. You can read it if you'd like. But the main things that I wanted to focus on were the three key points here, which is unpleasant truth.

AI is coming for your job and his job and every job. Easy tasks will no longer exist. Hard tasks will become the new easy and impossible tasks will become hard.

Scream into a pillow, pick yourself back up, and become futureproof, as we're going to learn in this video. And on top of that, other CEOs like Shopify, the CEO sent out an email telling his company that everyone should become AI first. I mean, even in this article, Dolingo is going AI first and replacing contractors with artificial intelligence.

And so, that scares a lot of people, right? Many people don't know what to do. They don't know what skills to learn.

They don't know what careers are going to be around, what jobs are going to be around. And while I have many thoughts about this, in this specific video, I want to give my main thoughts. How to become AI first and what you can do right now to prepare yourself for what's coming.

And I just want to say to start this out, I truly believe that this is one of the most incredible times to be alive. You have so much opportunity right now. You just have to one, find out what it is and then take advantage of it.

And by the end of this video, I feel like you'll have some clarity on what you can do. So the first solution here is to become AI first because there are three types of people who use AI. There's people who tried ChatGpt once a few years ago and thought it wasn't special.

There's people who use various AI tools for internet searches, summaries, and simple tasks that would take maybe 10 more seconds to do without AI. And then there's people who have used it enough to see the light and are using it in every place that they can. Now, I have a lot of opinions on AI.

I don't think that it makes people stupider. I don't think it takes away your creativity, but I want this to be a practical video, so I'll save that for another. But what most people don't understand is that the output of AI is up to your skill and imagination.

It's not that AI isn't as good as you. it's that you're not good enough at AI to make AI better than you. Most people think it's still just about typing questions into chat GPT when that's not the case at all.

If you give an AI extremely specific instructions on what to do, and these can be long or short, it will do those quite well. Like I recently posted on Substack how to create a landing page for a digital product and going through how to write copy for that. And I included instructions to create a prompt around that to write copy.

But there's so many different things and moving pieces there where if you ask the AI, hey, can you help me write a persuasive landing page? And then just expect it to spit stuff out out of the box without guiding it in a specific direction because you already have the knowledge to do so, then you're not going to get the best results. You're going to get the best results if you understand one how to find the best instructions for AI because there's many different ways to write a landing page.

You don't know which one the AI is choosing. And then you have to have it do a voice analysis of how you write so it can write like you. You have to give it your offer information.

You have to understand how to create an offer. You have to put all of these little pieces together for the output to be what you would have created in the first place. So it's still you creating the thing.

you're just doing a lot less work because your prompts, the prompts that you create and reuse and refine over time are like your little employees now. And of course, having AI do specific tasks for you is only one piece of the puzzle. And while it's not there yet, a lot of people think like, oh, AI doesn't give me that good of a response even if I use a bunch of detailed instructions, it's not there yet.

But it's going to be. You may think like, oh, why should I become AI first if it's not there yet? And that's the exact point is if you get to the point of understanding AI, then by the time it does get there, you will run laps around anyone else who didn't learn it.

So my biggest piece of advice here to practice to learn how to use AI is to try to automate yourself out of work. And this will make sense, I promise. But I want to start with a quote.

Being AI native isn't about building features for your users. It's an operating model for how to run your company. It's how you work, how you think, how you and your company breathe.

It's a rearchitecture, a rewiring, a philosophical shift from how do we scale humans to how do we scale decisions, creativity, and action with machines. Now, what sparked this video is a culmination of ideas that have just been building up over time. And one of those ideas is the notion of the selfdirected career.

So before industrialization, free individuals were mostly artisans and farmers. The mark of a free person was that they were meant to act on their own interest and do many things throughout their life. Around 80% of free workers were self-employed versus a mere 10% today.

Now slaves on the other hand were expected to perform one task for the rest of their lives. It was very repetitive. It was very mechanical.

It's work that machines are going to do now. But during the industrial age when machines started to come in, we just found ourselves trapped in Excel sheets and algorithms and factories doing this repetitive work. So the question then is will this AI revolution further remove us from autonomy and freedom to act on our interests?

And it's absolutely possible that most people will shift from autopilot living to autocomplete living, from having work assigned to them to having work done for them. But for those who value creative work and taking control of the choices they make, their agency, there's another option. Normally during technological transitions, humans adapt by developing higher level skills and forms of knowledge.

We abstract up a layer when skills inevitably become less valuable through automation. Now with AI, this is kind of happening again. We have to abstract up a layer beyond most of the skills that we've learned.

We have to transition from labor to mind. While AI can now think and execute as well as us, we must think about how we think in relation to systems that could do the thinking for us. So, as we continue, I want you to keep this question in mind.

When should I leverage AI and when should I do it myself? And that leads us to the second idea of becoming AI first. So, this guy, Signal, is one of my new favorite anonymous internet thinkers.

He just has a lot of good uh information. Now, this is a paid post, so uh I had I had to pay. I subscribe to him.

Uh I hope you don't mind, man, if I show this, but I I just want to show a few examples here, right? So, he just pretty much says most companies are falling behind. Not falling behind, already behind because they aren't AI first.

they aren't hopping on this technological wave that we're going through. But I want to show you a few examples of what it means to be AI first because I think this is he just put it in a very easy to understand way. So in terms of product or building a product, uh nonInative has slow feedback loops, manual research, roadmap debates based on opinion and then AI native is summarize all user interviews in minutes, generate road map options based on feature request clustering, simulate user behavior before launching anything.

So even as a creator, as a oneperson business, imagine when you're developing your own products, if you were able to do all of this because then you don't have to spend any of the time actually doing that. You get to focus on the more important things. So prompts here as examples would be summarize the last 50 user interviews and cluster the main pain points by frequency and intensity.

Suggest three product bets with highest signal to noise. Given the user feedback and usage data, write a product spec for a new onboarding flow. include edge cases and counterarguments.

Now, something on social media in terms of social media is like, okay, digest these 50 comments from my latest post and tell me what people's biggest pain points or interests or questions were from that. And you can have that delivered to you to give you more insight on the type of content that you should create. And it gives you a lot more insight than that because you can also build products around that and you can steer your business with more relevant information.

Now there's engineering, there's design, but one thing marketing. So not AI native, manual content, guessing what resonates, slow campaigns, AI native, generate and test content at massive scale, tune message to psychoraphics, not just demographics, live feedback loops with creative optimization. So example prompts are generate 10 variations of this blog post headline tuned to five different founder archetypes rank by project rank by projected engagement and then write a launch email in our brand tone optimized for early adopters who have bounced from the pricing page.

So this is like crazy right this is in incredible and you do it with a sentence a single sentence rather than hours of work. Now the last one I want to go over is support. So not AI native is human triage support reps reanswering the same questions.

AI native is autosolve tier one issues with 247 LLMs summarize complex threads for human escalations. Generate help center content dynamically based on ticket volume. I feel like a lot of this is already happening in the support space because we see these tier one issues with 247 LLMs.

What is really cool and since I run a software startup Cortex is that imagine just being able to summarize a thread with a user that was experiencing a problem and turn it into some kind of documentation article for the website that people can go and look up at any time or that the 24 LLM 247 LLM can just feed to a person that has a similar problem. So the question now is how do you start so that you're ready when that point hits? And my advice again is to practice automating yourself out of work.

So how do we do that? When you go to do any task, do this. Write down the entire process in detail like you were teaching someone how to do your job, including thought processes or creative processes.

We're actually going to talk about that specifically in a future video where I'm going to talk about the future of digital products, where I see information products going like courses, coaching, freelancing, other things like that. what creators have done for so long that are going to see a drastic shift. The next step is to assume that any task or piece of that process can be done with a prompt.

Then you attempt to turn that task or piece of that process into a prompt. Then you test it, note where it doesn't do well and refine the prompt until it's at least 90% of the way there. Then you store that prompt somewhere safe.

And if you don't know how to do that task, you can ask AI for detailed instructions of how to do that task. Now, this really depends on the task that you're trying to accomplish. For something like creating content or a YouTube video, a lot of the times you're just going to get general advice because every creator has their own way of doing those things.

It's a highly relative domain, right? That's where AI isn't going to thrive too much unless people give out their own specific processes. So if Ali Abdal and Alex Hormosi and I just started asking AI without any direction like hey how do I create my next YouTube video?

Here's the topic I want to talk about. So on and so forth. We wouldn't get as good results compared to if we were just going to do it ourselves.

So you need to get more specific. You need to give specific instructions to AI. So as an example I can go to Ollie Abd Doll's channel.

I can take one of his highest performing YouTube videos. I can spit give it to AI and tell it to break down the exact structure of the video. what worked, what are the psychological patterns he's using here, what's the structure of the entire video, just break it down in extreme detail, every single line, why it works.

Now, I have detailed instructions that I can turn into an AI prompt to recreate that with my own ideas. And every YouTube video is different. So, if you were to feed it a video that didn't perform well and ask for the same thing, then your video probably isn't going to perform well.

And it completely depends on the topics that you talk about and the types of videos that you want to create so on and so forth. So when people say like, "Oh, all of this content creator stuff is just going to be automated out of existence. " That's not how this stuff works.

Another way to find specific and useful information to feed AI in order to do a task is just from a book or a PDF. If you want to write uh copywriting for a landing page or emails or whatever it may be, you can upload the book Breakthrough Advertising or Great Leads or any other copywriting book and just say, "Hey, summarize this. Give me the exact very detailed way of writing copywriting and then you have instructions that you can feed AI turn into a prompt to write that copy.

" Now, one of the most valuable things that I have in my life right now is a very good prompt that creates prompts. So, this is actually a portion of what I taught in that article that I posted on Substack. But here's what I did really to write landing to teach how to write landing page copy or to turn copywriting into a prompt that I can use over and over again.

Now, I could have gotten more detailed with this, but what I did is I used Gemini 2. 5 Pro and I just said, "Research the book Breakthrough Advertising and give me an extremely detailed guide on how to write persuasive copywriting. " And it did just that.

It gave me an incredible guide to for every step of persuasive copywriting. Right? The reason this is so incredible is because this would usually take so long to learn in detail.

It takes a long time to be able to write good copy. And if you don't want to learn how to write copy, you want to focus on your craft. You want to write, you want to build products, you want to design stuff, whatever it may be, but you know that you need to learn marketing or sales or other things like that.

You can just create prompts, which are little employees that do those things for you that are 90% of the way there, which is still much better than 0% of the way there. If you were to go and write a landing page for a product that you have without any of this knowledge, it's not going to perform or convert anywhere near as well as if you were to do this. So, I had it spit out instructions.

And then from that, since I like to structure my prompts in two different phases, uh I said, "Imagine you were going to write landing page copy for me using all of these principles. What is all of the information you'd need to gather from me in order to write an incredible landing page? " And so what it did from all of this is it just wrote down all of the context specific to me that it would need.

So the name of the product or service, a description, the core problem, the desired outcome and benefit, the unique mechanism, the unique selling proposition, target audience, so on and so forth. So with all of this, it's like I could continue talking here and like somehow get it to spit out a landing page, but it's so much easier to take all of this information, turn these into documents that I can reference later, and turn them into a metaprompt. So what I would do here is I go to write incredible AI prompts and I tell it what I want to do, right?

So this is where I have the prompt that creates prompts. So if I want to turn something into a prompt, I always go here and I do this very often, but I'll show you what it did. So uh I want to create an AI prompt that generates a 500 to 10,000word landing page for a digital information product.

Structure your prompt in two phases. Phase one context gathering acquire all information you need according to the information inside questions needed from user. What that is is all of this this second output.

So all of the context that it needs from me where I asked like hey what do you need from me? So I gave that here because I turned it into a document and then I linked it so it can reference it and then I just said ask the user two to three questions at a time to prevent overwhelm. And then in phase two, write the actual copy.

So use the principles from how to write copy, which is the first answer to this, right? How to write copy is here. And then it's very long.

So I save this as a document and I fed it here. And then it says okay. And then it created a prompt, but it did it in a code block.

And so I just told it, hey, do this in markdown format. And then it broke it down into two phases. So first it's going to interview me.

What does it need? What's my product? What's my target audience?

All of that stuff. Then phase two, it takes all of that and according to how to write copy, which it gives the or this is the interview section of the prompt. And then phase two, write the landing page copy.

So here's what you do. Compelling headline, opening lead, problem desire intensification, so on. benefits and proof, so on and so forth.

So, if I want to write a landing page, I now have a prompt to do so. And all I need to do is send that prompt, give it my information, and then it will spit out a first draft of a landing page that's better than what most people can create when they haven't learned anything. So that's how I would become AI first is just get really used to that process is one figure out how to do something.

Write down the detailed instructions, turn that into a meta prompt so that you can run it over and over again and refine the prompt over time so it continues to get better and then soon enough you have this library of prompts that does most of your workflow for you. But of course becoming AI first isn't the only thing that you need to do. That's just a skill that you can practice developing right now.

If you do want to go deeper into that, uh, I have a free miniourse that I put out that goes over multiple different examples of kind of what we just did, but you can go and take that course so you can just understand the process a bit more. Now, on to the next section. You have to understand that you're probably going to have to change your life, and that's a very good thing with this section of the video.

I'm not in any position to tell people how to live, what they should do. I don't really understand your situation. I don't understand most people's situations.

I don't have kids to feed yet. I'm not working two jobs. I'm just a 28-year-old dude who likes to go on walks and write and eat dinner out.

Now, while I think there definitely is something you can do, you can still learn, you still have some amount of time, and you can make certain habitual changes in your life that gives you more energy or gives you whatever it is that you lack. And slowly over time, you'll be able to get into a better position. But to those people specifically who have these very busy lives, I don't know how to help you.

So, this next section isn't really for you. But for the majority of people who have at least a few hours to spare and are at least somewhat financially stable and generally have a comfortable life, what's the issue? Why are you complaining?

Even though it's overblown at this point and somehow still sparks controversy, the average 9to-ive jobs suck. And I'm not talking about the 01% who can nap and sleep pods at Google. We've collectively hated jobs for decades now.

Evolution solves problems. And now that one of the most painful problems in your life is being solved, working a job, you are mad, you don't really have any room to complain here. You're presented with one of the greatest opportunities of a lifetime, and you're still falling into the most cliche trap of comfort and playing victim and trying to hold on to your old way of life when all good things aren't permanent.

You still don't realize that if you work a job that a machine can replace, your life probably lacks novelty and meaning and fulfillment and challenge and complexity and continuous growth and learning. That alone is a massive signal to do something new. And this isn't an opinion.

Those things aren't opinion about things being meaningful or fulfilling. That's documented psychological patterns. First, you fulfill your basic needs and then you pursue your actualization needs.

And in order to stay in some kind of a flow state, you need to gradually increase the challenge that you can take on over time because that demands that you develop skills to match that challenge. But if you get stuck in this repetitive line of work where there is no more challenge after a specific point, you're just repeating the same day day in and day out, that's not fulfilling. That's not enjoyable.

You're not learning anything. you're not evolving or growing as an individual. Especially if you're spending 8 hours a day, a third of your life there and you're spending another third of your life sleeping and then you're spending the other third of your life scrolling because you don't have anything better to dedicate your time to because your life is just set.

You're doing the repetitive work every day. There's nothing more that you need to go after or pursue. So for those who are amply convinced now, you need to start building things.

The first point I want to cover here is that what's left is mastery and meaning because you have a few years before you are either let go or you keep your job and are eventually let go or you upskill endlessly to take on new roles in the company you work at or you have to fend for yourself. AI isn't just coming for companies and programmers. It's coming for everyone that has a brain.

Now, I'm sure somewhere in the far future we'll live in a world where we don't have to worry about money. But for now, we do. And we're going to go through an acclamation period where people are going to lose jobs.

We don't have anything in place to help them out like UBI, whether you agree with that or not. And that's going to be painful for a lot of people. So, I'm trying to show you that there is a way to do something other than your job in order to make money.

And what this AI first world leaves us with is a mastery and meaning economy. In other words, discovering and pursuing your life's work. you know, the thing you could have and probably should have been doing all along.

Now, I don't know if we're going to be doing this in VR or on Mars or somewhere in intergalactic space, but for now, we do it on the internet. You choose something you deeply care about. You study, research, and master it ruthlessly paired with an AI first mindset.

And you shamelessly share what you know, what you do, and why you do it in public. Because the only real safety net in today's world is a body of work that's impossible to ignore. And that leads to the second point here, which is attention is the only differentiator.

As the world is filled with more AI, trust, attention, and signal become more scarce. Yes, the dead internet is growing. There's a lot of content being pumped out.

There's a lot of bots on the internet. Anyone can go into AI and be like, "Hey, write me a tweet. " And then they can post it.

Or create a YouTube video and have the voice over in AI and someone on the screen or some kind of B-roll and they can post it. But from the example before with the YouTube title generation, that doesn't mean much because they're not going to get good results. They're not going to be able to pivot and iterate and make those things better to actually compete.

It simply means that the level of market sophistication will continue to increase rapidly. People will get bored of the cookie cutter and the cookie cutter will change every month. people will lose trust in most content and that doesn't account for the fact that you still have to know what you're doing in order to have AI create something unique and compelling.

Now, my advice is to use AI to do the things you don't want to do as a oneperson business. And the second thing is don't give AI complete control over the things you deeply care about. Don't have it do the work for you.

I personally like writing. That's my craft. not necessarily like the grammar aspect of it or writing something that's super poetic, but putting ideas on paper in the way that I want them to uh be put across or to be articulated.

And when I have AI take over that entire process, it doesn't feel mine. It doesn't feel like I created anything. It doesn't feel like I've given something that I care about to someone else.

Right? That's where the meaning comes into play. But for all of the other aspects, this is why this is an incredible time to be alive for many writers or creatives in general is because you can focus on your craft and people will see your unique content and trust that thing.

But now you can do everything else that a oneperson business or a business in general needs to survive like the marketing, the sales, the support, the design, however big your business grows, it depends on that. But you can have AI handle those things so that your writing gets seen by more people. so that you can sustain what you want to do with your life.

That's not inauthentic. That's authenticity at scale. It's the same thing as hiring employees to do it for you.

Because either way, you're not doing that work. It's just necessary for you to achieve your mission. Now, what does that mean?

It means you are the niche. You are the differentiator, your mastery, experience, and way of looking at the world through a perception forged by every bit of information you've processed over the entirety of your life. When AI makes 90% of the products the same, nothing really changes.

People continue to buy from people and brands that they know, trust, and care about. It's less about building a salesunnel and more about building a world that people can explore. I wrote an article about that as well.

It's called How to Build a World: The 2our Content Ecosystem 2. 0. So, I'll leave a link to that in the description to check it out.

And now the third and final point here, and arguably the most important, is that 1,00 true fans is increasingly relevant because most people don't want to be famous. And even if you do, save that goal until you're actually making a living. That's what most people want.

And you don't need millions of followers to get anywhere close to that. You need about a,000 true fans. And honestly, it's even less than that because if you're good at what you do, you can charge $5,000 per client for a service.

You can charge $10 for a paid newsletter. And yes, I'm on the Substack kick now. Maybe I'll make a video on that in the future about my thoughts on Substack and where I think it's going.

But for now, it seems promising. You can charge anywhere from $50 to $150 for any type of product. And then you can create spin-off products like a book or software since anyone will be able to code up an app that solves a specific problem for buyers to buy again.

Now, I would argue that most people can live just fine off of $5,000 a month. And if you have a family and more responsibilities than $10,000, $15,000 a month, that's three clients. That's three clients a month.

I know if you've been in the online business space, this is like a cliche thing. It's like, oh, land one client or land three clients and you replace your income. But it's true.

And if you have something like a $10 subscription, which I really don't recommend as a beginner, watch my last video, which was a Q&A based on creator tips. But if 500 people buy that subscription, then that's $5,000 a month recurring. It takes a lot more time to get there because you have to sell a lot more, but it's just an example of what you can do.

500 people on an internet that has four to five billion people there isn't that much to ask for. You can take a piece of your pie. And now if over the course of a year you build out an offer stack where you have a high ticket product, you have a low ticket subscription and you have a product in between then you need like one person to buy the high ticket a month.

You need 10 people to buy the subscription. You need 10 people to buy the actual product. And considering how attention flows on social media, how people go on to follow new people and other natural fluctuations that those outside of the game can't see, there's really more than enough attention to go around.

The key here is that you treat it as the opposite as your job. It's work that evolves. It's work that demands continuous learning.

It's work with a prerequisite that you have at least some of your life together. The minute you stagnate is the minute entropy increases. And that's a wonderful thing.

Staying the same is the enemy of a good life. Thank you for watching this video. Check out links in the description to Cortex, which is our note-taking and AI software with all models and 25 plus workflows in one place.

You can subscribe to my Substack for two free weekly letters or you can check out the premium version of that that has some more bonuses. And other links to the resources I mentioned throughout this video are also in the description. So like, subscribe.

Thank you for watching. Bye.