How to Start Using AI at Work (Without a Tool Hunt)

This week a Cybercab drove through my neighborhood. Nobody in the driver's seat, no crowd, no keynote stage. Just a car with no one steering it, going about its day like it belonged there. I didn't get a picture because I was driving, which is its own kind of joke: the only car in that moment with a human doing the steering was mine.

The same week, Elon posted a two minute video about humans spreading across the solar system. I watched the video and thought it was a movie. I watched the car and realized it was a preview.

If you haven't seen it, the video moves from Earth to the Moon to a city on Mars, then out to the asteroid belt, floating cities above Venus, a "thinking city" on one of Jupiter's moons, and something waking up under the ice of Europa. It closes on the idea that the rest is still out there.

It's easy to watch that and file it under entertainment. Honestly, a lot of it probably belongs there. Elon's timelines are like contractor quotes. The direction is usually right and the date is usually fiction.

But look at how the video opens, because that's the part worth your attention. Before a single rocket, the premise is people and AI working together. Everything else in the story is stacked on top of that, and that part isn't a hundred years out. It's in your inbox, your CRM, your kid's homework, and apparently driving down my street.

That's how this stuff arrives. First it's absurd, then it's a demo, then it's a novelty you point at, then it's just Tuesday. What's changed is how short the gap between those stages has gotten. Robotaxis were a keynote promise not long ago. Now one is a thing I passed on the way to get coffee.

Last week I wrote about recruiters filtering for AI usage in your most recent role. The bigger idea underneath that issue is simple. Working with AI isn't an if anymore. It's a when. Which means the only real decision left is how long you hold out, and what holding out is costing you in the meantime.

For most people, the cost isn't getting replaced next month. It's the gap. The person who started working this way eighteen months ago has a year and a half of reps. They've hit the failures, figured out what the tools are bad at, rebuilt a few workflows, and learned where to trust the output and where not to. None of that transfers by reading about it. You only get it by doing it, and every month you wait, the gap compounds.

So forget the tool hunt. The fastest way in is to pick one thing you do every single week and refuse to do it the old way for a month. A report, a follow-up email, meeting prep, a proposal. One task, done differently, every week, until it sticks. That's how the reps start.

If you run a business, the question is a little different, because your customers already made the move for you. They're asking ChatGPT who to call. They fill out your website form at 10pm and expect an answer before they call your competitor. They text your business line on a Sunday. Two things worth doing this week: ask an AI assistant for the best version of what you do in your town and see if you show up, then fill out your own website form after hours and time how long it takes to hear back. Both answers tell you how far behind the market you really are.

If you've been working twenty years, you've earned your skepticism. You watched the dot-com crash, the social media gold rush, the crypto and metaverse pitches, and a hundred "this changes everything" promises that changed very little. Rolling your eyes at a video about thinking cities on Jupiter's moons is a completely reasonable response.

But skepticism is supposed to make you a better judge, not a spectator. The people I'd most want testing these tools are the ones who've been burned before, because they know what bad output looks like, they know when a shortcut will break, and they don't fall for the demo. That experience is an advantage, but only if you're in the game using it.

There's a video version of this issue, and full disclosure, the guy talking in it is my HeyGen avatar, cut together in Claude Code with Elon's footage as b-roll. Reacting to a video about artificial minds with an artificial me felt about right. It's still an experiment, and I'll tell you honestly how it performs.

Jamie is also live. She's an AI voice agent on nicksakkis.com that calls you back the moment you fill out a form, and you can try her yourself at nicksakkis.com/ai-agent. She's not built to replace a receptionist. The point is covering the gaps a team can't: after hours, form fills, texts, and ad leads nobody gets to in time. If you want to see what speed to lead feels like from the customer's side, fill out the form and see how fast your phone rings.

The world in Elon's video is decades away, if it shows up at all. The one where a car drives itself through your neighborhood is already here. You don't need a plan for Mars. You need an answer to a much smaller question: what's one part of your work you're going to stop doing the old way this month?

How long are you holding out?

See you next Wednesday.

Nick

If you're a business owner wondering where AI actually fits in your sales process, or you're building a team and trying to figure out what AI fluency should look like, I'm happy to talk. Book time at nicksakkis.com.