Lesson 10b: How To Benefit From AI

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All right, let's chat about some AI stuff today, shall we? It has been quite the crazy situation over the last year. We're sitting here in early 2026, and we've been in debates about whether or not AI is a bubble, and it's just completely moved well beyond that place. AI is certainly not a bubble, and I'll give you a couple examples.

The first one is, are you still using pencil and paper in your business? Whether you're some kind of creative, whether you're in finance, whether you're in R&D, whether you're a lawyer, whether you're a marketer or a salesperson, it's highly likely that you're not using pencil and paper to do your job and communicate with other people. You're not using the mail to send letters back and forth. You're using computers.

You're using email. You're using tablets. You're using phones.

You're using things that are internet products, internet products that have been built over the last couple decades. You're using third-party software tools. You're using web search.

You're probably using ChatGPT or something like it these days, and once a technology, a planetary-scale technology is developed, there's no putting that thing back in the box. It's just not. The internet has not gone away.

Email has not gone away, and AI is not going away. It's just a faster way to get things done, and humans love automation. Humans at scale create things because basically, at its most fundamental essence, we're lazy, but that's a benefit.

We create tools so we don't have to do everything ourselves. Imagine if you had to live out in the woods, build your own house from scratch, everybody, fashion nails, fashion screws, fashion a screwdriver, fashion a hammer, chop down wood, put it together, create glue, electrical wire the thing, and then you've got to go also be a farmer. You've got to plant food.

You've got to bake bread. You've got to tend to livestock. You've got to do all these things, and then you have to take care of your family, and then you have to do a bunch of other white-collar work.

It's just not. It's untenable. So that's part one.

Part two of all of this is really what are we seeing right now? So we see a lot in the world of technology, both in enterprise SaaS world, software as a service, brand new startups that are thinking about and coming to market from idea even into we've got a product that's scaled to millions of users, all based on AI, and then Fortune 1,500, 250 companies that are building internal tools. So what you see is that now we're in a competitive dynamic race, and this is the other reason that AI is not a bubble. We're in a competitive dynamic race.

So because I'm competing with you, and you're adopting AI, and you have new features, capabilities, products that are being released, my customers are shifting to you. So I need to hurry up and do the same thing and then go past you. So not just one big initiative, but another initiative so that I can maintain my customers, and then they see it, and they do it.

And so it's this back and forth race that we're seeing across every industry, every type of company, because AI is a horizontal and vertical tool. It can potentially interact with every function within a business. So that's an internal facing solution, and then also provide external capabilities to your customer base, which is a new product offering that could potentially have a higher subscription fee, or just a higher price point, which means your revenue goes up, and it enables differentiation, potentially defensibility, which we won't get into in this video.

And that then helps you maintain high NPS, high CSAT from your customers, and create some differentiation from your competitor, but then they're doing the same thing. So on and on we go. So that's part two of our conversation.

Part three, then, is where are we seeing this develop? Well, one place we're seeing this development is as close as possible to revenue. So sales processes, not just new lead generation, but all the things that lead up to it, like just expense filing. I do a bunch of sales, I take a bunch of Ubers, I got a bunch of meetings, and meals, and coffee receipts, and it takes me hours and hours and hours a week to go through this horrible process in an app that is not efficient, to make me take the picture and then allocate it to a certain GL code, and then like get an approval, and oh this one was wrong, so the manager looks at it, I have to go back, I need to look at, and on and on and on.

And that could be done in like 10 seconds, right? So just things like that, times a million things. So we know companies that have a thousand AI agents that have been built and deployed inside organizations, because it's managing all these little teeny tiny like frustrating ticky-tack things. So those things aren't necessarily taking a job, but there is another place that is.

So if you're in an industry where you're close to revenue, there's a ton, tens of thousands of transactions every month, and you're having to process those things, and like look up a thing, review a thing, make sure the line item invoices match, and then process it, and then review it, and then like schedule it for payment, or manage like exceptions, right? Handle exceptions in a process where like, oh our automation didn't quite catch this, now there's something new that has to catch it, go out, do that thing. Or like a survey tool where I'm trying to figure out what my customers want, and then new digital like twins and synthetic data is being used, so I can ask questions of like a faux persona, or a faux customer of like what they think about my new product. So I can create a new product spec like this shirt, upload it into a digital twin persona, and say, hey are you willing to buy this, and if so at what price point? And all the data we've collected from them over time gets fed into that, and then boom it gives me an answer in real time.

So I can create a new product in AI, test that new product in AI, and iterate rapidly a million times without me ever spending a dollar of like going through manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, marketing, advertising. So that feedback loop becomes really really rapid, and I can produce things that have potentially a higher impact in the market, and give people what they want, so less waste is created in the market. So those are benefits to AI, right? So then the question I guess is what do we do with all this? Because we're sitting in rooms with highly sophisticated private equity investors, and their investment committees, and they're asking themselves a very very critical question, because they're managing money on behalf of limited partners.

Those limited partners are wealthy individuals or families, like a family office let's say. It's pension funds. For example, you work your entire life inside an education system inside a company.

When you retire, you're expecting to get payments for the rest of your life because of all the work you did for that company. Where does that money come from? That money comes from putting money away for the company inside an investment, and part of that investment goes to private equity and venture capital, these startups. It's going towards AI.

It's going towards public companies that are investing in AI. So your financial future of retirement is in large part driven by success of AI. And so we're having conversations at the investment level where they have a large pool of money that they haven't deployed yet, and so there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of pent-up demand here.

But the market is changing so rapidly. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Cloud Anthropic, and it's disrupting everything. And it's saying, are these guys going to eat all of these enterprise SaaS companies' lunch? Is it going to come for all the professional services companies? What's happening? So I'm scared.

I don't want to deploy money into something that the business is going to go to zero, and I'm going to lose my shirt and potentially my job, and also have a negative impact on all of those people, the consumers around the world, that depend on this retirement in order to live their life. So I have a very strong fiduciary responsibility to get this right. And so these are critical, critical questions that we spend a lot of time analyzing, thinking about, discussing internally, discussing with sophisticated investors.

And it really comes down to like, one, a displacement threat. So essentially the ChatGPT is ChatGPT, and the whole sort of AI thing, going to basically do this business. Are they going to subsume all of these features and products and data and everything? And this business is going to go to zero, and all the employees are going to left out.

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And so the question then becomes, is it real? And then also defensibility of moat. So I have very specific data. I've been running this company for 10, 20 years.

We have a lot of customer information, a lot of interactions, we have strong relationships. Is there something inherent in that business that either a competitor or all of that AI world, ChatGPTs, Geminis, Anthropics can't take that business from? And the party line that's been developed over four or five years is that data is the new oil, data is the moat, data is defensibility. And what we're actually finding is in some cases, that isn't true.

In some cases, if you're just collecting data at each moment in time, and then using that data to give something back to the user, that means you don't have any defensibility. Because it's just, I just need a user to do a thing, and then I use that thing to give them back a thing. There's no moat that's been developed over time.

The other side of that is we've developed three, five, 10 years worth of historical data that's used when a customer asks us a question or interacts with our product. And that, if that goes away, the value to the customer drops dramatically. In that case, there is defensibility with data, right? Okay, so then more importantly, the real question becomes what is real defensibility is you can't look to the past, and you can't stay stuck in today.

You've got to think about the future, right? Because in the future, utilizing a new technology, you can then invent and create, like an artist, new capabilities that have never existed before. Those new capabilities can give your customer superpowers. The first ones to turn your customer into Superman or Superwoman, now becomes the reference product, the product that all other products are compared against.

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You become the category king, you become the brand. It's like you become, you Google it, I need to Uber somewhere, you become that thing, right? Apple with the iPhone, you become the reference product upon which everything else is compared. So you then win.

And so the question that I don't hear a lot of companies, almost zero, spending any time thinking about building is what is some new, artistic, world-changing, completely unique capability that I can deliver to my customers to make their life faster, better, easier, cheaper, and have higher ROI within a year, in a shorter timeframe, ideally a month. Now, everyone's doing the chatbot thing. Let's just throw an AI chatbot, like ChatGPT, in the interface over the top of our information and our data.

I'm here to tell you it's table sticks. Everyone has that already. There's open source tools on the market.

You can just adopt it, fork the code, plug it into my database, boom, you're off to the races. Now, sometimes it's not that quite that easy, but what I'm telling you is that that is not a differentiator. Now it's table sticks.

When customers are looking at vendors and going to make a selection on who I'm going to buy from, it's a check the box. Are you SOC2 compliant? Do you have security? Check. Do you have a chat interface? Check.

Like it's not something where they're going, oh, wow, that's crazy. And then now we're getting into like digital twins and things, or like synthetic data. It's starting to be interesting.

We're getting into agentic workflows, which is you used to do a series of tasks along a very niche process. Now I've automated those niche tasks along a series of processes, and I've given that to you. And because of that, I've saved you from weeks.

It takes seconds. So I'm willing to pay for that. Those are all known ideas.

Those three things I just mentioned are known ideas in the market. Synthetic data, digital twins, AI chat bots, and agentic workflows. Those are known.

Those are getting deployed at scale for startups, for the mid market, for fortune 1000 companies. So I sit here and I ask you, what are you doing that's different? What are you doing that's unique? When everyone in the world is doing the exact same thing, and everyone's touting AI, you are in a sea of sameness, and it's just noise, and there's zero differentiation, and no one is out in front. There's not a single one that's out in front.

The only one is the foundational model companies who are developing new features and capabilities, and they talk about this overhang and job loss, and it's become a spiritual, political, economic conversation. But where's the superpower? Where's the product that's getting you paid faster as a consumer, as an enterprise, and making your life a better experience? Ding, ding, ding, quiz question. That is my hope, my desire, and my challenge to you.

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And so you've got to think like an artist right here. This, this is the answer. It's not the sameness.

Jackson Pollock predicted AI decades ago. And this is the thing that you need to lean in on, because this is where your ideas will come from. And this is what's going to capture the hundreds of years to come.

We all go to museums, and we sit in front of things in awe, because they're worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They're priceless. It's one of one.

And people come from miles and miles all over the world, and they've lasted for hundreds, if not thousands of years. That's the bar. And the bar above that is nature.

So I look to you, because I can't do it all. I am one human being, and my lifetime is short. But there's 8 billion of us on this planet, and millions, tens of millions of businesses.

That's the intention for today. And think creatively. Be unique.

Be the thing only you can do. Create the thing only you can create. In that is differentiation, defensibility, growth, the whole thing.

Better experience, positive vibes. Do the thing that you are uniquely qualified to do at your absolute core, as a human or as a business. And expand on that using the plethora of new tools across the emerging tech landscape.

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Spatial computing, digital assets, artificial intelligence, robotics, right? The whole thing. Video, social, mobile. It's all mechanisms.

It's all ingredients that you can pour into your product or service. That's it for today. I love y'all.

Stay creative. Let's kick some butt out there.