I feel like a Manhattan Project scientist. I can see what is coming; I have a sense of how powerful it will be, and most of the population has no idea yet.
That sounds dramatic. I have spent the last year and change with my hands inside agentic AI every single day, breaking things, rebuilding them, learning the hard way that architecture actually matters. And the thing I keep running into is not the technology. It is who is choosing to stay away from it.
Here is what I have noticed. The only people who tell me they don't use AI, don't want to touch it, have a moral or ethical or environmental reason to keep their distance are women. Almost every time. You know who is not saying that to me? Dudes. And you know who is building the models? The same dudes.
So the math gets uncomfortable. You can get in there and shape how this tool works for you, or you can let your world get built by other people and live in whatever they decide to hand you. (Robots optional.)
A McKinsey study found that AI could widen the racial wealth gap. Not because the technology is biased on its own, but because of adoption. The people with the least room for error are the slowest to pick it up, and the gap grows from there. That is the part that keeps me up.
The hesitation makes sense. The tech changes weekly. If you are not obsessed with it and not in it daily, it is genuinely hard to keep up, because we have never in human history seen a technology improve this fast. So people wait for it to settle down. It is not going to settle down.
Waiting is the expensive choice.
Here is the reframe I give every leader I work with. You do not have to become an engineer. You do not have to love this. You have to understand enough of the foundation to make decisions, so you are not the person in the room nodding along to a software pitch you can't actually evaluate. I have sat across from VCs who say they invest in AI and cannot tell me the difference between two of the most common tools on the market. I have watched executives about to buy software that doesn't do what they need it to do, and they can't say so out loud. Because how does a leader admit, in that meeting, that they don't understand a critical technology shift?
That is the door. It is open right now, wider than I have ever seen a door open for people who got shut out of the last few technology waves. Women, people of color, operators from backgrounds that never came with the cheat codes. For once, the playbook is being written in real time, and nobody has a ten-year head start.
It will not stay this open. The platforms will get more polished, credentialing will creep back in, and the scrappy early advantage will fade as it always does. For now, the smartest thing you can do is walk through.
The next piece is about what I actually do once someone decides to walk through, and why I teach the leader rather than build AI workflows for them.
A note on how this got written: I used AI to help me write this. The stories, the opinions, and the scars are all mine. I just have a very good robot assistant who helps me get them out of my head and onto the page. Which is more or less the whole point of what I do now.