The Hardest Part of AI Isn’t the Tech—It’s Getting Started
5 Industries About to Be Turned Upside Down
There was an audible gasp across the room of 70+ entrepreneurs, not the easiest cohort to knock off-center.
John Sinai, a futurist who worked with NASA to help develop plans for a self-sustaining lunar city and an AI expert at both Duke and Singularity University, had just shared his prediction of the next five industries that will be disrupted down to a marginal cost of zero. When an industry hits zero marginal cost, what was once expensive becomes essentially free, destroying old business models and creating entirely new ones. He explained that these industries are following the same trajectory as music, photography, entertainment, communication, and information; sectors that once required significant time and money, but are now ubiquitously available at no additional cost.
“The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”
–William Gibson, science-fiction author (1993)
The next wave of industries whose future is already unevenly here?
- Transportation – will soon cost pennies as autonomous, electric vehicles eliminate the need for drivers, fuel, and maintenance
- Energy – breakthroughs in renewables and nuclear fusion will make power virtually limitless, and nearly free
- Computing Power – AI is making once expensive, time-intensive tasks nearly instant and free; quantum computing will push these limits beyond our current comprehension
- Services – legal, accounting/finance, marketing, and consulting will be reshaped as AI-driven human augmentation and automation replace human expertise at a fraction of the cost
- Healthcare – AI is diagnosing illnesses and personalizing treatments more quickly and cheaply than ever before
We’ve seen this before. The digitization of music, photography, and communication felt like a slow shift…until suddenly, it wasn’t. These industries are following the same trajectory, but at a speed we’ve never seen before. The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen, but how quickly we as leaders will need to adapt or be left behind.
I know, I know…but your business is different. People want and need the human touch and interaction, and you are absolutely right. But let me ask you this, how much of your revenue is directly tied to that aspect of your service? My guess is it’s only a small fraction.
All that remains will reach a marginal cost, and therefore value and revenue, of near zero. Not if, but when.
This is why adopting AI into your business is no longer negotiable. Not if, but how.
The Hardest Part of AI Adoption Isn’t Actually the Tech
This realization didn’t happen overnight for me. For the past two years, I’ve dedicated 20+ hours per week to navigating the AI landscape, not just testing the tools, but more figuring out what actually works in real business applications to make my team better. What started as curiosity turned into a mission: building AI tools and integration strategies to amplify the specialty skills of each person on my team by 10x.
When I first started integrating AI into my business, I hoped (expected) for immediate impact. I assumed I’d plug in the robots, and things would start running smoother, faster, and smarter right away. But that’s not how it works. Instead, I found myself hitting walls of frustration I didn’t even know existed.
I’d try a tool, it wouldn’t work the way I expected, and I’d feel like I was wasting my time. I’d get one breakthrough, but couldn’t get it to repeat consistently. Solve one issue only to realize it introduced three new ones I hadn’t anticipated. Through each learning cycle, I rode the same emotional rollercoaster enough times to start understanding, predicting, and therefore coaching myself through each stage of resistance – fear, frustration, despair, and existential crisis. Rinse and repeat. Each time wondering if my vision was unattainable or if I was just leading my team on a destructive wild goose chase.
During the AI Planning Workshop, I watched business leaders go through this exact learning cycle in real-time. Some came in skeptical, others overwhelmed. Some had dabbled with AI but weren’t sure if they were using it ‘right.’ But by the end of the workshop, every single one of them had AI-powered tools to turn weeks into hours, months into days. But perhaps even more valuable than that, they were able to short-circuit several learning cycles and increase their AI confidence and fluency to drive AI innovation inside their organizations.
The biggest mistake I see many leaders making right now isn’t ignoring or doubting the power of AI, it’s hitting the frustration phase and giving up before reaching a perspective-shifting moment of breakthrough. That moment when your mind is blown by the output. That moment when your thinking opens up on a new way to leverage. That moment that will likely change the trajectory of your organization and maybe even your life.
This is where I hope to help by reducing the troughs, softening the blows, and getting you where you need to go faster and easier. Because like most leaders, I’m guessing you don’t have the extra time or energy for endless trial and error to navigate this on your own.
The Next Steps for Adopting AI
For the last 18+ months, I’ve sent one article a month sharing stories and lessons on building leadership, improving health, and finding meaning. In the next month, I will start sharing one additional article focused exclusively on the foundational building blocks, necessary mindset shifts, and practical use-cases of how we have/are integrating AI into our business.
We just completed the workshop on using AI for strategic planning. At the end of the workshop, every single participant shared the same sentiment: “What’s next? Whatever it is, I’m in.” Based on the impact and positive feedback from the AI Planning Workshop attendees, I am currently building out a monthly workshop series to provide usable tools, prompt chains, and experience shares to help you become an AI-integrated company, to super-power you and your team to do things faster and better while expanding and clarifying your thinking in ways you likely have never imagined.
If this is something you may be interested in or just curious to see exactly what we covered in the AI Planning Workshop and how they were able to build a “95% of the way there” 3 Year Vision and 1 Year Plan in under 3 hours (instead of the 3 months it originally took me and my leadership team), just reply to this email.
Email me back and I will send you the full workshop recordings + a link to a Virtual Advisor built on John Sinai’s insights, and then you can ask “him” how he thinks AI is going to impact your industry over the next several years.
The pace of AI adoption isn’t slowing down, it’s only accelerating. Every major shift in business creates winners and those left behind. The leaders who lean in now will shape the future, while those who hesitate will spend the next decade desperately trying to catch up to survive.
As the Chinese proverb says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”
Now is your second-best time to start integrating AI into your business.
Lead With Energy (and AI),
Derek