Yesterday, a reader posted an angry comment on one of my YouTube videos.
“AI is going to steal all our jobs,” he whined. “And you're just sitting here making jokes.”
I shifted uncomfortably in my seat and said:
“I'm starting to get a little worried.”
Because… well…
He's completely right.
And simultaneously, irritatingly wrong.
See, right now, the internet is flooded with “AI automation agencies” and freelancers bragging about how they use tools to do the work of ten people.
They think this makes them indispensable.
It actually makes them the easiest targets for replacement.
If your entire job consists of taking inputs from a client, feeding them into a language model, and sending the outputs back… you do not have a business.
You have a manual API endpoint.
And manual API endpoints are the FIRST things to get automated when companies realize they can just cut out the middleman.
The classic mistake is treating AI as a replacement for human labor… rather than a component of a larger proprietary system.
Let's look at what's actually happening in the AI space right now.
We are moving past the era of “chatbots” and entering the era of Agentic Workflows.
If you don't know what that is, you are already falling behind.
An agentic workflow isn't just asking a model a question. It's giving an AI agent a complex goal… giving it access to tools (like web browsers, code execution, and databases)… and letting it work autonomously for hours or days.
It plans. It executes. It verifies. It corrects its own mistakes.
If you are a copywriter using AI just to write faster… you are still competing on price and speed.
Someone else will eventually do it faster and cheaper. It is a race to the bottom, and the bottom is exactly zero dollars.
Ugh, this is a nightmare 🤦♂️
So, how do you stop being the victim of the AI wave and start being the one who owns it?
You must shift your focus from “using AI” to “owning the workflow.”
Imagine you are trying to help local real estate agents. The amateur approach is to start an agency where you use AI to write their property listings.
You charge them a monthly fee.
It works for a month… until they realize they can just use the tool themselves.
The professional approach — the approach of someone who actually owns the AI — is completely different.
You do not sell them a service.
You build a closed system.
You create a software platform that automatically integrates with their local MLS database… pulls the property data… generates the listing using a highly customized model tuned specifically for real estate conversion rates… and automatically publishes it to all their social channels and syndication networks.
In the first scenario, you are a replaceable freelancer using a tool.
In the second scenario, you are the architect of a system.
The real estate agent never even sees the prompt. They just see the result. They are not paying for the AI; they are paying for the integrated workflow that solves their exact problem without them having to think about it.
This is the secret that the tech billionaires do not want you to realize.
They want you to stay distracted, arguing on Twitter about which model has the best reasoning capabilities or who has the largest context window.
They want you to remain a consumer of their intelligence.
Because as long as you are just a consumer, they own you.
Let's talk about another massive shift: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG).
Right now, everyone is obsessed with foundational models. GPT-4, Claude 3, Gemini.
But foundational models are inherently generic. They know a little bit about everything, but they don't know the specifics of your business.
They don't know your company's internal wiki. They don't know your specific legal precedents. They don't know your past customer support tickets.
The real money is in RAG.
It's about taking these generic reasoning engines and securely connecting them to proprietary, highly specialized data.
If you can build a system that securely indexes a law firm's thousands of past case files… and allows an AI agent to instantly retrieve and synthesize that specific data… you haven't just built a tool.
You've built a digital partner that they can never fire.
Because if they fire you, they lose their custom brain.
If you want to survive what is coming, you need to stop being impressed by the parlor tricks of language models and start looking at the boring, messy realities of traditional businesses.
Look for the chaotic workflows.
Look for the disconnected databases.
Look for the manual data entry that takes hours of human capital.
That is your goldmine.
You do not need to build the next foundational model. You just need to build the plumbing that connects the intelligence to the real-world problem.
Be the plumber, not the water.
The people who own the pipes are the ones who get paid every time the water flows.
The window of opportunity to build these systems is closing faster than you think.
In a few years, the infrastructure will be set, and the winners will be decided.
Stop asking ChatGPT to write your tweets. Stop watching YouTube videos about prompt hacks.
Start building systems.
Start owning the workflow.
Or get ready to be replaced by someone who does.
