Seizing The AI Opportunity
How being an 'AI Director' brings big advantages.
As an AI consultant, I’m always asking people what they're doing with AI, and how they feel about it.
Regardless of who I’m speaking with, I typically hear mix of excitement and anxiety.
Most people share a nervous sense that they’re behind on AI. And it's no wonder. Every week brings headlines of groundbreaking new features that used to seem impossible.
The pace of advancement is relentless, feeding a growing fear that we're missing our chance to get ahead in the AI revolution.
But here's the pleasantly surprising truth. I like to say that we're only at the tip, of the tip, of the iceberg of AI adoption.
While the technology races ahead, actual utilization remains in its infancy. That’s why Mr. Wonderful recently said that AI implementation is the #1 business to get into.
There’s an extraordinary opportunity before you. Anyone can become an early adopter simply by starting to use AI daily and intentionally.
But the key isn't mastering complex prompts or chasing every new feature.
Success comes from being an AI Director – someone who can orchestrate AI tools to enhance their work, decision-making, and creativity.
This skill, more than any other, will define the winners in the AI age.
The Time is Now
The numbers tell a striking story about where we are in the AI revolution.
According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, only 39% of Americans have ever used generative AI, and just 23% use it weekly at work.
Their analysis suggests we've barely scratched the surface – only 1% to 5% of work hours currently utilize AI, with a total time savings of just 1.4%.
Gallup found that 70% of U.S. employees never use AI at work, and McKinsey reports that while 92% of companies plan to increase AI investments, only 1% consider themselves "mature" in AI deployment.
To grasp just how early we are, consider previous tech revolutions:
In 1995, only 14% of Americans were online – two years after the first web browser launched. We're at that same moment with AI, two years after ChatGPT.
Those early internet adopters built skills and advantages that lasted decades.
By 2011, just 35% of Americans owned smartphones. Yet that was early enough for people to build entirely new careers and businesses around mobile technology.
Today's AI adoption sits at this same pivotal point. McKinsey compares AI's potential to the steam engine's impact on the Industrial Revolution.
So this is your moment. People who start using AI now are discovering dramatic improvements in their work and personal lives.
They're completing projects in hours instead of weeks, turning ideas into reality faster than ever, and finding creative solutions they never imagined possible.
Early adopters are advancing their careers, starting new ventures, and building skills that make them increasingly valuable as AI transforms every industry.
Anyone can be one of the people who others turn to for guidance, who employers seek out for their AI expertise, who clients trust to help them navigate this revolution.
Beyond Prompt Engineering
The era of prompt engineering – the skill of crafting perfect instructions for AI models – is already fading.
Three years ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted, "we won’t be doing prompt engineering in five years" as AI is evolving to understand natural human communication.
Instead, the future belongs to “AI Directors”, who can orchestrate multiple tools to achieve complex goals.
This won’t be about mastering a single, all-powerful AI. It's conducting an ensemble of specialized AI tools, each optimized for specific tasks.
As Andrej Karpathy, former AI leader at OpenAI and Tesla, describes it:
"We'll probably end up with models of different capabilities, in various unique domains… with specialized roles and niches."
Rather than focusing on individual prompts, AI Directors:
Adapt AI solutions to specific business contexts
Design integrated workflows combining multiple AI tools
Optimize human-AI collaboration, and verify accuracy
But you don't need to wait to become an AI Director.
Simply begin by identifying your most important workflows and experimenting with different AI tools to optimize them.
Each successful workflow teaches you more about orchestrating AI effectively, building the key skill that will define leadership in the AI age.
Tools for Becoming an AI Director
In my work in AI enablement, I've found that two breakthrough AI features consistently stand out as the most transformative for both individuals and organizations: AI-powered search and custom GPTs.
While there are thousands of AI tools available, these two offer the highest impact with the lowest barrier to entry, making them perfect starting points for aspiring AI Directors.
AI-Powered Search
Consider this: people perform 8.5 billion Google searches every day, more than one for every person on the planet.
As an AI Director, you have an easy opportunity to supercharge this task.
Traditional search engines make you hunt through links and scan pages, while AI search tools act as your full service research team, doing the reading and synthesis for you.
Three leading tools showcase what's now possible:
Perplexity is a real-time AI search engine that instantly reads and synthesizes current web content, providing immediate answers with citations.
Google’s NotebookLM functions as a genius research librarian on steroids, analyzing documents you upload and engaging in detailed conversations about your materials.
Open AI’s new Deep Research tool works like a dedicated analyst, systematically investigating complex questions with internet research and delivering comprehensive reports with citations.
Together, these tools handle the core tasks of research automatically. Tasks that once took hours of searching and reading now take minutes.
The productivity implications are staggering. Early adopters of AI search tools gain:
Dramatically faster research capabilities
Better analysis and decision making
Reduced risk of missing critical information
This efficiency gain compounds over time, but the real value isn't just faster research – it's learning to direct AI tools effectively.
As you master AI-powered search, you'll develop the confidence and skills to orchestrate more complex AI workflows across your work.
Creating Custom GPTs
Most people use AI by asking random questions to a generic interface.
But the transformative power of AI emerges when you create custom GPTs – specialized AI assistants tailored to your exact needs, without requiring any technical expertise.
Think of custom GPTs as building your own fleet of expert workers. Each one can be trained for specific roles:
A content creator that perfectly matches your brand voice
A strategic advisor that deeply understands your goals and context
An expert coach that helps develop your skills in specific areas
The process is remarkably simple. With a ChatGPT Plus subscription, you can create custom GPTs just by describing what you want them to do.
It's like hiring new team members, but these ones work 24/7, scale infinitely, and continuously improve at their assigned tasks.
Like using AI-powered search, creating custom GPTs is perfect training of your AI orchestration skills.
As AI agents become more sophisticated – capable of taking actions on your behalf – the ability to operate these tools will become increasingly valuable.
The gap will widen between those who can create and manage specialized AI tools and those who simply use standard applications.
This is your opportunity to move beyond being an AI user to become an AI Director – someone who shapes AI tools to amplify their capabilities and achieve their specific goals.
The future belongs to those who can orchestrate their own fleet of specialized AIs.
Catch a glimpse of this future in this video where I used five different AI tools to research and write every sentence of my last essay.
Adoption is Individual, not Organizational
The smartest organizational AI strategy isn’t a top-down system that you roll out—it’s empowering employees to use AI tools that are tailored to their roles and individual workflows.
As an article on AI adoption from Wharton notes, "employee behavior change is at the core of AI transformation".
They recommend that companies have employees "rewrite their AI-first roles" so they are empowered to see AI as an "enhancer" rather than a threat.
This is crucial because Gallup reports employee engagement is at a ten-year low, with 70% of workers not engaged. AI can either inspire these employees or alienate them further.
So instead of focusing on grand AI initiatives, savvy business leaders encourage individual experimentation and learning.
In our AI enablement consulting, we help people experiment with custom GPTs and specialized AI tools to enhance their specific workflows and processes.
When people experience AI as their own productivity enhancer, transformation happens naturally.
Companies that embrace this bottom-up approach see powerful results:
Teams actively seek out AI solutions rather than resist them
Workflows become more efficient through organic optimization
Innovation flourishes as employees view AI as a creative partner
A culture of AI fluency develops naturally
Organizations that teach their people to design AI that makes their jobs easier and more fulfilling create a culture of engagement, innovation, and AI fluency.
And success stories spread. When one person discovers how AI can eliminate their most tedious task or supercharge their creativity, others want to learn.
This creates a ripple effect of adoption and innovation throughout the organization.
This is how real transformation happens – not through mandates from above, but through people discovering AI's power to make their work better, faster, and more creative.
The Future Belongs to AI Directors
The AI revolution isn't just another technological shift – it's a fundamental transformation in how we work, think, and create.
While others debate AI's implications or wait for the "right time" to dig in, AI Directors are already shaping this future.
These pioneers aren't technical experts or AI nerds. They're regular people who saw the opportunity and took action.
AI Directors are using AI-powered search to make better decisions, creating custom GPTs to improve their workflows, and building valuable skills that separate leaders from users.
The choice is:
You can become an AI Director, orchestrating AI tools to amplify your capabilities and create transformational value.
OR
You can wait until AI skills become table stakes, when the biggest advantages have already been claimed.
The path to becoming an AI Director can start with a single step: choose one important task in your workflow that AI could improve.
Each small success builds your capability, and prepares you for the next big feature that comes out (probably next week).
Those who orchestrate AI now won't be replaced by AI – they'll be the ones helping to define how AI is used in their fields.
They'll be the ones others turn to for guidance, who employers seek out for their expertise, who clients trust to navigate this revolution.
The window is open. The tools are here. The opportunity is clear.
The future belongs to AI Directors. Will you be one of them?
At Coachfully.AI, we help people become AI Directors, and master the skill of AI orchestration to improve productivity, fulfilment, and decision-making. Instead of relying on one-size-fits-all AI tools, we’ll help you customize AI workflows to fit your unique needs.
Learn more at Coachfully.AI 🚀