3 Skills to Thrive in a Post-AI World

What are the skills that you should learn in order to thrive in a post AI world? I think they fall in three camps. The first one is really simple. The skill of using AI. Easy. Stay on the cutting edge. Stop using the free version of Chad GPT. Find accounts to follow on Twitter cuz Twitter is where the conversation is happening about AI. If you're serious about leveling up in AI and you're not on Twitter like looking

at it every day, I think that's a mistake personally uh cuz that's where the conversation is happening. That's not to say you have to play with every new AI tool that comes out. It keeps you on the front lines of the conversation. We are sitting right now through an insanely huge technological shift like getting involved in the in in AI using it every day understanding like what is claude code what is codeex what's perplexity up to

who are the interesting people to follow in the AI space when open AI or when Google or when anthropic is doing like their annual conferences and stuff where they're explaining what's going on can you watch some of these talks can you understand what's actually happening and instead of just sort of sitting there and trying to understand it can you figure out how you can apply this amazing new technology to your business or your life or your

work whatever that thing might be again it's sort of like being early to the internet most businesses in the world didn't have websites for a very long time and the ones who decided to create websites uh they won I think another thing I would say for this is get as close to revenue generation as possible when it comes to any kind of job there's sort of like three prongs of it number one is making the money

number two is doing the work and number three is shall we say uh operating/admin now with whatever your job currently is for most people it is probably in number two or in number three it's doing the thing if you're a management consultant your job is probably when you're more junior making the PowerPoint slides coming up with a strategy using the their Microsoft copilot or whatever AI tool they've got to query the database getting on calls with

experts in the field and putting together a PowerPoint presentation that is the doing of the work you could be in the back office or you could be working in HR um or you could be working in IT or like admin and stuff where your job is to sort of administer the work But your job is probably not making the money, i.e. winning the work. In a post AI world, I think doing the work will become an

AI thing. Administering and operating the work will increasingly become an AI thing. But there will always be a need for people to actually win the work, to actually make the money. This is why partners at accounting firms and management consulting firms and law firms get paid loads of money. It's not because they are better at making PowerPoint slides than the associates. It's because they have the relationships. They spend time on the golf course. They spend time

whining and dying dining clients to the point that they can bring new clients into the firm. In a world where our AI overlords take over, there will still need to be some kind of commerce happening. And the people who are closest to revenue generation are the people who are the safest. I have a business. I have about 20 team members in my business. Some of them are cost centers. They cost the business money. And some of

them are profit centers. They make the business money. Who do you think is more likely to stay around if the business goes through difficult times? If you can find a way to generate money for your own business or for your employer, you are way more likely to stay around in the world of AI and be way more valuable compared to someone who is on the doing of the work or on the operation side. Like for example,

we're just about to hire a uh director of client success. Client success or customer success is generally a cost center for most businesses. But if the business is good, the leader of that department turns it into a profit center. So instead of thinking of yourself as like I'm the person answering customer support, it's like no, no, that's just, you know, that's a cost center that's easily automatable with AI these days. Everyone's automating that. But if you

can be the one to orchestrate a system that causes customers to uh not cancel their memberships or to stay and pay the money, pay the company money a little bit longer, you're now touching revenue generation and that makes you insanely valuable with whatever you do now and whatever you're going to do in the future. Generating the revenue is way harder than doing the work. And I wish more people knew this. Everyone working in anything other than

sales and marketing. You probably think of sales and marketing as being scammy and being like, "Oh my god, sleazy. I don't want to do that." But the more you can get yourself as close to the revenue generation as possible, the more likely you are to thrive in a post AAI world. And so coming back to this, if if you learn how to use AI properly and you're using AI to generate literally generate money for your business

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this video. And let's get back to it. The final thing I would say as a skill, again, everyone talks about this, but it's so true. Personal branding. It's all well and good being someone who is really good at AI and who generates revenue. But you also want to be known for being the person who's really good at AI and really good at generating revenue. You want to be known internally within your own company. Let's say you

work in a big corporation. You know the power of like stakeholder management and the power of like visibility and how like your promotion doesn't come from how good you actually are, but how good your manager thinks you are and how good your manager's manager thinks you are. No human in their brain can actually understand the context behind what you're actually doing. But if your reputation is someone who gets things done and makes the company money and

is pleasure to work with, you're way more likely to succeed in whatever your line of work is. And so that's personal branding just within the context of your business. But what if [music] you were able to do personal branding outside of just the context of your business? What if you were able to create content on LinkedIn explaining how you're using AI to generate revenue for your company? The company's happy because it's like they get extra press.

You're happy because now your personal brand is growing. What if you were to write a newsletter talking about behind the scenes working in whatever the business or area or job that you're working in? What if you were to start a YouTube channel where you're giving people advice and sharing your own experiences and stuff? Sure, not everyone's going to vibe with it. But, you know, case in point, right now you are watching this video because I've spent

the last 10 years just making up on the internet and posting it. And some people find it useful, some people don't. Some people leave nasty comments, some people say nice things. But either way, for someone with a personal brand, someone who is known for being competent at like in a particular area, it is a lot easier to thrive in a post AI world because ultimately even though AI might be the one doing the work, it will

be humans who are making the decisions about where to spend money, where to allocate resources, and where the AI is going to be pointed. For example, you were to build a personal brand being known as like the the go-to person for I don't know AI for accountants and a human is holding a conference and running organizing a conference on like for accountants and they're thinking oh we really need to talk about AI because everyone's talking about

this whose name is going to come to mind is it going to be some random person or is it going to be you because you have built a personal brand and a professional reputation around being a sort of thought leader in that space and it's not that hard to be a thought leader in the space I think the old school way of of doing this is thinking you need a credential potential and then you're allowed to

teach or you need experience and then you're allowed to teach or you have some form of credibility and then you start teaching. But in the new world and this has been true for like 10 plus years so it's not that new but it seems to be new to a lot of people I speak to. In the new world it's like by virtue of doing the teaching that is how people think you're legit. I do not have

any qualifications to teach you about productivity. I do not have any like there's no badge of there's no credibility here. There's no there's no badge. There's no letters on the CV. Yeah, I was a freaking doctor. Okay, if you're a doctor then giving health advice is like a different thing. But like I have built a personal brand being known as the productivity guy because I was just making helpful videos talking about how like my productivity tips.

Anyone could do that right now. You starting you could get really good at using AI because we're still early and most people suck at doing it. You could figure out how to get close as close to the revenue generation as possible and you could start sharing content online about what you're doing. Obviously don't give away any trade secrets, but just be helpful to others. Be a teacher. Personal branding when you're doing it on the internet is

really just about being a teacher. Except instead of teaching to a lecture hall of like five or six or seven or 30 or even 100 people, you're posting stuff for free on the internet which is able to be watched by anyone anywhere in the world and then they view you as a thought leader in that subject which means you stand out in their mind which means again in a post AI world where our AI overlords are

like doing all the work. The human will still think of you in their mind when they think of oh I need someone to talk about accounting. Hopefully a human at some random company will still think oh we want to do a talk about productivity. Oh I used to watch his videos back in the day used to. So hopefully they might reach out to me and be like, "Hey, do you want to be paid 100 grand to

give a talk about this thing?" Which has happened in the past. The power of being known for being the person who's competent at the thing is insanely valuable in a post AI world. Now, when it comes to personal branding, just to double click on this, there's sort of two ways of doing this. Number one is you have a word of mouth personal brand. You are known amongst people by word of mouth as being really good at

doing a particular thing. I was recently trying to hire an accountant and I messaged some of my entrepreneur friends in Hong Kong being like, "Hey, anyone known an accountant in Hong Kong?" and they recommended this guy Pierre at the firm A Climb. I was like great. I'd never heard of him, never heard of the firm, but the fact that it came from a recommendation from a trusted person and I was like great and I hung out

with Pierre and now we're going to sign on with their firm. Fantastic. Here and his firm have a good word of mouth reputation. Then there is for example the online personal brand where it's sort of like I mean it's hard to imagine in this accounting example, but if I were to search accountants Hong Kong, I suspect they're doing some level of search engine optimization to try and get to the top of the thing. Maybe they have

an Instagram page or a YouTube channel where they're giving advice and maybe I come across their videos and I'm like, "Oh, sick. These guys know what they're talking about. Oh, I want to work with them." Amazing. When I was searching for like, you know, what's the tax situation in like Singapore versus Dubai versus like Malaysia versus like Hong Kong, I came across this guy called Andrew Henderson who makes videos on a on a YouTube channel called

Nomad Capitalist. And I was like, "Oh, his videos are good. They tell you all about like high net worth tax strategies and like that." And we paid $25,000 to work with his team. That is an online personal brand. And so this is not like an eitheror situation. And it's not like you can have a word of mouth personal brand or an online personal brand. Ideally, you want a personal brand, i.e. a professional reputation that is genuinely

looked upon with favor amongst the people that are in your in your industry. You want to be known as like, oh, Jane's an amazing accountant or like Jack's an amazing IT person or like Harry's an amazing developer. But it puts fuel on the fire if this sphere of influence you have goes beyond pure word of mouth and actually starts hitting the shall we say mass market. And even then, it doesn't have to be the mass market.

It's not like you're trying to be famous. You're not trying to be like Brad Pitt or like Jennifer Aniston or whatever. You're just trying to be known within your niche. These are sort of like the the word of mouth. These are the people that know you in person. And these are the people within your niche that know you online. And then these are total strangers that have nothing to do with your niche. And I think this

is kind of pointless, but this is a great place to be. And this is a great place to be. I mean, you probably don't want to dance on TikTok to get known by random strangers on the internet, but you do want to be famous famous niche famous to someone who's in your industry. Let's say we're using a management consultant example. If you're known as like, "Wow, this person's really good at like, you know, consulting. they did

an amazing job for blah blah blah blah blah with company X Y and Z and you give a talk at a conference of other people who are in that industry. You're increasing your personal brand, your personal reputation in that particular space, right? That would be uncontroversial. Doing it on LinkedIn is the same thing. It's just you're doing it online and like a random person on the street is probably not going to read your LinkedIn posts about

how you increased lifetime value for I don't know enterprise customers working with British Telecom or whatever. They probably won't, but someone in your industry would read that because it's what they care about. It's just really valuable to be known in your industry to people that know you in person and also to people that haven't yet met you in person as like a solid stellar go-to person who is great at what they do, delivers on time, delivers

well, is a pleasure to work with and shares freely what they're learning so that others can benefit from it. My whole take is that basically everyone should be a sales guy. A job is where you are working for a business, right? What does a business exist to do? A business exists to serve customers and make money while doing it. What does every business struggle with? Making money. What does every business want more of? More customers. Like

the only reason reason the business is paying you is because there is some kind of connection between the work you do and how much money it makes for the business and the only reason they're continuing to pay you is because what you do ends up costing them less than the amount that you're making them. And the more explicit you can make that connection, the more you're aware of that connection itself, the more leverage you have to

be able to negotiate raises, to be able to switch jobs, to be able to start your own business cuz you know exactly how much you are worth. Sales feels like a dirty word to a lot of people, but sales is literally what keeps the economy alive. The highest paid people in a company often are the sales people, not necessarily even the CEO. often the sales people get paid more than the CEO does because they're literally bringing

in the money. Um the most valuable people in a company are the ones who are generating the most revenue with the exception of like if it's if if the product side of the business is really hard and you're like a genius in product then sure you're very valuable as well but you're valuable not because you're making an amazing product but because that amazing product causes the business to make a ton of money. It all comes down

to how valuable are you at generating money for the business that you work in whether it's your own business or someone else's. And it's just an unfortunate truth that that is just like how capitalism works. And this is what someone's market value is based on. It's like when you when you think how much to pay someone a salary, it's based on the market rate, right? What's the market rate based on? It's based on supply and demand.

The demand for people is higher when they can make more money. I don't know. I think the closer you get to revenue generation and the less people can have like a fear or anchor or a discomfort with the idea of sales and the idea of money, the easier it is to stay competitive in a post AI world, even in a pre-AII world to be honest. So, think about like get closer to revenue generation possible. Honestly, we

could summarize that all as sales. Sales doesn't have to be getting on the customers on the phone and cold calling them. Sales is like your ability to express ideas to your team, your ability to get buy in from your team about an idea that you have, your ability to keep everyone aligned, your ability to negotiate with your manager or your manager's manager, your ability to manage up, your ability to manage down, just an insanely valuable skill

set. And it will stay that way even in a post AI world. Unlike the skill set of accounting, even in medicine, half my friends are doctors from back in my back in my doctor days. Even the skill of being a doctor is now being kind of democratized by AI where the ambient listening devices and like the diagnoses the AI is considering is doing a better job than most doctors at diagnosing the patients. This is already happening

and it is the worst it is ever going to be right now. It's only going to get better in a world where that is that's happening and the AI is like a genius level person that can just do anything. I think sales is still sales. convincing another human to part with their cash and convincing them that like what you or your business or your career or your job or whatever you think is that's just almost like

the only valuables the only thing that is still left in this world. Now, if you've gotten to the end of this video and you are serious about leveling up an AI and becoming an absolute AI fiend, an AI demon, then check out this video over here. This is my Yes, it's an introduction to using claw code, but it's way more than that. And I've had messages from lots of friends and team members saying that just watching

that video gave them the firmware update mindset shift they needed to actually start taking AI seriously. And it's that video from what I've heard from friends and team members has changed people's lives. So check out that video over here. Thank you for watching.