"How do you actually prepare for the age of AI?"

The guy next to me on my 12-hour flight back to Germany asked me that last week, about 30 seconds after finding out I write about AI for a living.

I've been getting some version of that question from basically everyone lately.

My girlfriend's sister lost her job a few weeks ago and is trying to figure out how much of what she used to do is about to be done by an AI model. 

She has to figure out what comes next without much of a map, in a job market now full of people in the same position.

I look over at my almost 1 year old son sleeping in the next room.

He’ll probably never drive a car himself, and the world he’ll mature into will look NOTHING like the world does today.

You’ve probably been thinking about this too.

And there's no UBI or clear social fabric for any of this.

The speed of AI progress and disruption is truly unprecedented in human history. 

I've been chewing on this stuff a lot lately.

So today, instead of the workflows I typically write in these newsletters, I wanna talk about the current AI landscape.

What I’m seeing and what I think the best moves are to future-proof yourself.

There are 3 moves I’ve thought of (and luckily, none of them require any talent you don't already have).

The biggest risk in 2026 is that AI makes you mentally lazy enough that you stop being worth hiring in the first place.

You probably haven't written your own emails in months, your meeting notes write themselves, and you barely finish your own opinions anymore before an LLM completes them for you.

There's a stat that always sticks with me: when given the option, over 90% of people take the elevator instead of the stairs.

That's the default human move.

LLMs are now the elevator for thinking, and most people are happily riding them down.

The people pulling ahead are doing the opposite, using AI to learn faster instead of thinking less.

30 to 60 minutes a day actively wrestling with the tools. Working with the models.

Figuring out what they can and can't do yet, where the rough edges are, where the leverage hides.

You'll be ahead of 95% of professionals within 90 days just by doing this consistently.

Then take it one level further: tinker.

Build something tiny for a real problem in your own life.

Could be a spending tracker pulled from your bank exports, a weekly menu generator from your grocery receipts, or a little standup bot that interviews you about what you got done yesterday.

The exact project doesn't matter.

Building one of these forces real understanding in a way that watching 50 tutorial videos never will.

The biggest upside in AI right now is taking deeply specific knowledge from a real industry and applying it.

Most builders I know go way too vague. They try to build something for everyone, end up building something for no one, and wonder why nothing sticks.

If you've spent 10 years in commercial real estate, you know things about how deals actually get done that no LLM has been trained on. 

And if you've worked your career in something like pharma logistics or fast-food operations, you have insight someone sitting in a SF data center could not generate in 100 years of guessing.

Domain expertise is your moat.

It stacks with the 3 mega-trends that are going to shape the next decade: AI, robotics, and biomedical / life science enhanced by AI.

Whatever you already do, find the overlap with one of those three and lean into it hard.

There’s no need to become an AI researcher or a developer.

You can just become the AI person for your specific industry.

The person who actually understands how the tools apply to dental practices, or independent insurance brokers, or mid-size logistics ops, or whatever world you already live in.

The unsexier the industry, the more upside there is. Almost nobody wants to admit that out loud, but the people who have actually done it know.

Building some form of social leverage is still the single highest-impact move you can make right now.

The point is getting into the right rooms organically, without ever having to ask for an introduction.

Every meaningful opportunity that's come my way in the last 3 years traced back to something I posted publicly, and none of it would have happened from a cold pitch.

And as AI floods every channel with synthetic content, the value of being recognizably human in your work keeps going up.

Lean into specificity, lean into your weird angles, write the stuff a generic model would never write.

Then the spicy half of this move:

Working a single full-time job is now higher risk than running your own thing.

I know that sounds stupid backwards.

It would have been wrong even just a couple years ago, but IMO the math has changed.

When you work for one company in an AI economy, you're betting your livelihood on one set of decisions that one CEO is making about how to handle the most disruptive technology in human history. 

If they get it wrong, you're out, and the next job might not exist or might pay half.

Running your own thing means multiple income streams, different skill stacks, a bunch of small bets instead of one giant one riding on someone else's strategy.

You become the diversified portfolio in a world where everyone else is a single stock.

Learning entrepreneurship is the highest-leverage thing you can be working on right now, and AI is actively making it easier than it's ever been to start.

Tbh nobody actually knows where AI lands in 3 years.

But I think if you're staying sharp, building real leverage in public, and running your own thing, you're going to be way more adaptive to whatever comes than the people who picked one safe lane and hoped.

I'm rooting for that version of you.

Ole

P.S. A lot of future-proofing yourself in this landscape really does come down to one thing: getting genuinely good at using AI day-to-day.

The Claude Cowork Marketing OS is the fastest way I know to get there.

It's my entire marketing system bundled into 21 skills (copywriting, landing pages, email, content workflows) that you install on your own machine in under 2 hours.

The same setup that runs my whole marketing operation behind a 7-figure business and 10M+ monthly views.

I walk you through it click-by-click on video and text. No technical ability required, true hand-holding the whole way.

Grab it for $149 here.