May 19, 2025
“Are you pivoting your focus to AI?”
Friend-of-the-list Vikram Shetty responded to my recent string of AI-related messages to ask:
Are you pivoting your focus on selling with AI?
Seems like AI is all over your emails lately.
Regards,
Vikram
Thanks for the question, Vik!
Nope, I’m not pivoting to AI as the primary focus of my writing.
So why have I been writing about AI so much?
- My writing is based on my daily experience, and I’m using AI a lot
- AI is super useful for thought-leader types (my audience)
- AI is super useful for solopreneurs (also my audience)
- AI seems to be hastening the demise of hourly billing (which is my mission)
- People who object to using AI mostly seem to be parroting FUD headlines
To expand on that last point...
Here are some reasons I’ve gotten from people about why they aren’t using AI (with my retorts in parens):
- “It can’t do what I do better than me!” (then use it for something else)
- “I tried it and wasn’t impressed!” (then try it on something else)
- “It sucks at X, therefore it sucks at everything!” (logical fallacy)
- “It’s wrong sometimes!” (so are people but you still listen to them)
- “It’s bad for the environment!” (compared to what, exactly?)
- “It’s unethical to content creators!” (then don’t use it in a way that plagiarizes people’s work)
- “I don’t want to support big tech!” (okay, but do you use Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Zoom, LinkedIn, Github, Slack, Uber, or any of a hundred other big tech products and services?)
- “It’s going to take all our jobs!” (maybe, but that’s not a reason to not use it)
- “It’s going to kill us all!” (doubtful, but that’s not a reason to not use it)
Look, I don’t really care if you use AI or not.
But I would be bummed if you were avoiding it for no good reason.
Yours,
—J