When rapid innovation turns your world upside down, you have two choices. You can look at it like a storm to be survived, or a sharp curve in a racetrack to lean into.
The winning strategy in the Age of AI is to choose to get behind the wheel and drive it.
In my life, I've made the decision to be a driver, not a complainer or a spectator. I've made that decision twice, and it's made a world of difference in my career.
Now, as we embark on a turning point in technological (and human) history, I share the valuable lessons I’ve learned and actionable ways you can set yourself up for success in this new AI age.
I'll never forget when Netscape released their groundbreaking Mosaic web browser in late 1994. . The internet went from a geek's playground to the top priority for almost every CEO in about one year. Every executive suddenly needed an "internet strategy."
At the time, I was a sales manager at a cable production company. Every day after work, I'd stop at the Richardson Public Library to find books on the "World Wide Web.” I'd visit the current periodicals section, read magazines like Red Herring and Wired, and absorb everything I could.
In the spring of 1997, I read an article in Information Week about a local startup led by Mark Cuban in called AudioNet. They were going to put videos on the web. I made a copy of the article and took it to my boss, who promptly said, "It will never work."
So I I interviewed with Cuban's company, joined as an account executive making $1,000 a month plus commission, and started smiling and dialing.
I learned something important from Mark: Credentials are a statement about what you have achieved, but curiosity signals what you choose to learn.
By the time Yahoo bought us a few years later, I had spent significant time on Google, asked around and became known as a "query master" – someone who could leverage search tools to prepare strategic briefs for customers. That attention to learning led to opportunities I couldn't have imagined. (I chronicle that journey in Love is the Killer App.)
The lesson here: curiosity and open-mindedness will be what sets you apart in times of disruptive change.
Before COVID, I read a book called Prediction Machines. It revealed the disruptive economics behind artificial intelligence and helped me understand a fundamental truth: AI is simply a prediction machine that takes information you have and produces information you don't have.
But the most important insight was this:
For the first time in human history, AI successfully decoupled prediction from judgment.
In the past, prediction and judgment lived together in human experts. Now machines can make predictions at scale, and humans can focus on judgment. This creates a world where human judgment becomes more valuable than ever before.
I call the high value of human judgment the Rick Rubin economy. Rick Rubin, the legendary music producer with nine Grammys and production credits on 31 platinum records, described his value in a recent interview this way: "The confidence in my taste has proven fruitful for other people."
What he’s describing is judgment, which will be the coin of the realm moving forward.
And here's the key: Judgment isn't something you're born with. It's a muscle you develop through self-awareness, practice, and feedback. Anyone can provide this valuable human judgment if you work at it. It’s also a trait you should look for in talent and then invest in developing.
In five years, I believe agentic AI will be the dominant technology worldwide. Jeffrey Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, observed recently their new batch of companies all have one thing in common — they're either building agents or supporting agents. Think about agentic AI as a ladder we climb. It starts with chatbots and copilots. I call it "Waze to Waymo."
Source: G2
Here we have Waze in the lightest gradient. Waze revolutionized mobility by solving the prediction problem for navigation, but it only augments you — you still have to drive. Waymo is different. You get in the back seat, Waymo takes the wheel, and it transforms your mobility experience. With Waymo, you are free to do whatever you want in transit. But you have to trust it much more than you do Waze. And that is the difference. More on that later.
This transformational technology is coming sooner rather than later. Each year, agentic AI will advance in reliability and sophistication, and by 2030, we’ll see systems of agents swarming to solve really hard problems in a fraction of the time that humans with low-level AI do today. So, how can you prepare?
If you aren't doing it already, start climbing the ladder today. Begin with deliberate practice, utilizing chat and copilot tools throughout your workflows.
Every hour you spend in deliberate practice (e.g. using ChatGPT) or deliberate study will pay dividends to your career earnings.
But the larger problem businesses will face is adoption. It usually is with new tech. For example, even years after the US Postal Service bought Model T's for drivers, many continued to use horses. Why? Because they trusted their horses more than a machine.
This is the trust gap – the difference between a technology's reliability and people's willingness to trust it. My analysis of data over nearly twenty years calculates that the trust gap during cloud computing between 2006 and 2023 cost US corporations $44 billion a year in lost opportunity. Can you imagine what the trust gap in AI, especially agents, will be?
Who wins in five to seven years will not be determined by the best operating plan, leadership team, product, or talent density. Those things are necessary but not sufficient.
The winners will be companies where 100% of people trust AI enough to let it be agentic. The secret to trust is simple: Make yourself familiar with AI and gain value from it. The collective experiences will help you gain more trust in it than your competitors. And that will be the difference.
My recommendation: spend four hours a week focused on AI.
Read, get hands-on keyboard time with AI, and talk about it with people you do business with every day. Study. Practice. Share.
The future always comes faster than scheduled. Give yourself one hour a day, and it will turbocharge your life.
Want to hear more about what’s coming up next in AI? Check out these key takeaways from NVIDIA GTC.
