400 Million Companies
There are 400 million small and mid-size businesses in the world. Four. Hundred. Million. 76% reported they are either actively using or exploring AI. (PayPal research) But don’t let that number mislead you. Here’s what it really means: Trying ChatGPT. Piloting automations. Seeing what’s possible. I.e. dipping their toes in the water. Only about 5% […]
RAG in 3 steps
I’m going to mix it up a bit and give you something more technical this time. My 3 progressive steps to learning RAG: Most people building AI apps treat LLM context like a filing cabinet. You open it, dump everything in, and hope the AI finds what it needs. That works. Until it doesn’t. The […]
The AI Project Challenge
I had a call this week with Maya. (name changed for privacy) She’s a supply chain data analyst at Nordstrom. Been in the role about a year. A few weeks ago, her manager connected Claude Code to their database through an MCP server. Now, dashboards that used to take a week to build manually in […]
Stop waiting for your lucky break
You’ve heard the formula: Luck = Opportunity + Preparation. Whoever came up with that was onto something. But most people focus on the wrong half. They wait for the opportunity. The perfect job posting. The right connection. Here’s the thing: you can’t control when opportunity shows up. You can’t control when a company decides to […]
How to vibe code without getting dumber
On March 5th, Amazon’s North American marketplaces went down. 6.3 million orders lost. Amazon engineer: “People are becoming so reliant on AI that essentially they stop reviewing the code altogether.” Connect the dots? Everyone’s vibe coding now. Prompt in. ➡️ Code out. ➡️ Ship it. ➡️ Next feature. And honestly? For getting something working fast, it’s remarkable. Cursor, Claude, […]
OpenAI asked him this question. I still can’t believe it.
Last week I caught up with one of the participants in our 6-week AI Project Challenge. Let’s call him Robert (name changed for privacy). Robert said something that stuck with me: “Our skill set is supposedly in very high demand, but I’ve never had a harder time finding a job.” Here’s the story: Robert has […]
The layoffs aren’t the story. This is.
I want to show you two numbers. 50,000. That’s how many tech workers were laid off in the first 60 days of 2026. 24%. That’s how much the stock price of Block jumped the day Jack Dorsey announced he was cutting half his workforce. (A company making $10 billion in annual profit fired 4,000 people […]
How to double your impact in any presentation
This morning I ran the kickoff call for our third AI Engineering Challenge cohort. Ten people on the call. DevOps engineers, cloud architects, a physicist, a cybersecurity pro, a Java developer at Adobe. Different countries, different backgrounds. I walked them through the project they’ll be building over the next 6 weeks — their digital twin. […]
The 5-point checklist we give our challengers
So we’re running a 6-Week AI Project Challenge. The first cohort is 3 weeks in, i.e. half-way. I had a call with them yesterday, and I noticed something. The people making progress? It’s not about their background. We have engineers, analysts, career changers. It’s not about coding ability. Some are fluent in Python. Some are […]
AI won’t take your job (if you do this)
Most people think about AI wrong. They see automation. Fewer workers. Job cuts. And that’s terrifying — if that’s the only way to think about it. But there’s another way: augmentation. Not AI replacing you. AI amplifying you. Same number of workers. More output. Better work. Here’s why augmentation wins: 1. Adoption. When companies push […]