Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Stanford AI Expert: 71% of People Won't Survive the AI Shift — Here's the 30-Minute Fix | Kian Katanforoosh, CEO Workera
Episode Date: March 9, 2026Stanford AI Expert Kian Katanforoosh tested 22,000+ people on their AI skills — 71% dangerously overestimate or underestimate their level. In this interview with Marina Mogilko, Kian breaks down wha...t separates AI adoption from proficiency, why 95% of AI agents fail in production, which skills survive the next decade, and his 90-day plan to get ahead. Kian is CEO of Workera, Stanford lecturer, and co-founder of deeplearning.ai with Andrew Ng.📌Grab your anti AI writing guide: https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/how-to-write-with-ai?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=how-to-write-with-ai&utm_content=kian-katanforoosh-interview🎧 Episode with Linked CEO Ryan Roslansky about the future of work:https://open.spotify.com/episode/5sa1EeC262QyyZow3bfwYY?si=55maoBEITMWE02O8rV78nQMore from the Silicon Valley Girl: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirlLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko
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How often do you use AI? If it's not daily, I think you're generally behind.
That's Kian Katan Farouche, Stanford AI Professor, who built one of the world's top AI education platforms with Andrew Ng.
Now through his company, he's tested over a million people on their AI skills, and today he has a step-by-step plan so you don't fall behind.
What are the three moves everyone should make in 2026?
Learn the foundations of AI, assess yourself to make sure you're ready, build the habits.
of learning. If you focus on one thing for a day, you probably are already in the top X percent of
the world. For a week, nonstop, you're in the top 10%. Focus on a month, you're in the top 1%. But to be in the top
0.1% you will have to. Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Silicon Valley Girl and Davos.
Kian, let's start with your big idea. 2006 is the year of humans. But also, we're getting a
completely different narrative, you know, a new model every week, replacing jobs. How is it? How is it?
How do you think we should focus on humans right now?
And what is the shift?
I think the shift that is happening is broadly due to the fact that people generally
overestimate the impact of technology on the short term and underestimate what the technology
can do on the long term.
If you look at all the reports from foundation model labs, open AI, Anthropic and others, there's
a lot of task level reports.
like AI is good at task A, task B, task C is getting automated.
And actually, going from a task to some human's job changing
with a job usually being made of hundreds of tasks is not that simple.
It can take decades.
And almost every prediction that I've seen since the launch of Chad GPT of XYZ job is going away
has not happened.
You know, the famous one is the radiologist will go away and the drivers will go
and then you see this meme of radiologists driving to work in their car.
You mentioned drivers.
Do you have an estimate, for example, because if you go in San Francisco, it's almost,
Waymos are almost everywhere.
I don't really see older taxis.
So we see the replacement happening, but how soon do you think it's going to happen
for drivers, for example?
Yeah.
Well, you look like the rise of Waymo, cruise, all these companies in the
the self-driving space, you know, really started in 2014, 2015.
So we're already 11 years into them having hired tons of engineers to build that problem.
So even Autonomous Driving has been a decade of full-on research with people working so hard.
So, you know, why wouldn't it be the same for the rest?
I think, like, maybe in the next decade, we're going to start, you know, seeing less voice actors, less translators.
Maybe customer support is going to completely change.
I agree fully with that.
I just think people thought it would happen within six months.
Yeah.
And it hasn't.
Yeah.
So we're safe for now, at least like for the next five years.
Generally, I think safe in a career comes down to learning velocity.
It turns out to can you reinvent yourself?
Yeah.
You know, the WHOF has this metric called the half-life of skill that is going down,
meaning on average, a skill is not useful that long.
It's two years in tech or AI.
And so you have to refresh yourself.
And that's what makes you safe ultimately.
Absolutely.
Absolutely. And your data shows 71% of people misjudged their AI skill level.
Can you give us some benchmarks?
So what is an AI proficient person?
What does it, does day to day look like?
Does he start with like chatting with his AI?
Or is it not writing emails by yourself or having AI manage your schedule?
Yeah, I tried to separate adoption of AI and proficiency.
So I give you an example.
Adoption is like you use AI every day.
And I use it every week.
you're a better adopter than I am.
But it turns out that if we watch
you prompt engineer and me,
maybe your prompts are just simple prompts.
And when you look at what I'm doing,
I'm doing a variety of techniques.
I'm doing zero shot prompt.
I'm doing a few shot prompts.
I'm doing a chain of thoughts.
I'm doing a prompt chain that is super complex
that feeds one into another.
I'm doing a retrieval augmented generation system
that I built.
My proficiency is higher than you.
Yeah.
That's the difference between adoption and proficiency.
Okay, what you just said makes me feel like I'm a beginner,
because my pronouns are really, really simple.
Okay, if I want to sound like you in 90 days,
what should I be doing?
So first, if you have 90 days, I would say,
first we need to establish the foundations.
You take a few foundational classes.
We can recommend some on deep learning.
on other platforms.
There's a lot of content out there, honestly, high quality.
Establish the foundation.
You will get to a point where what will matter the most in AI
because the market is moving.
so fast is that you're plugged in the network. So what I recommend generally is you go to X,
you go to Reddit, you go to some of the machine learning popular newsletters, and you register to all of
these. Can you recommend, like, who do you follow on X for Best Advice? Well, actually, if you go on my
X and you look at who I follow, you can follow the same people. But, you know, some of them are here,
like Andrew Eng is a great person to follow, great newsletter called The Batch, Richard Socher,
you know, Yoshobenzio, a lot of great AI scientists that, you know, people trust.
And actually it allows you to cut through the noise when there's so much noise coming.
Like I tell you, when I was in grad school, we would read a lot of people that come up in archive,
the website that, you know, where papers are often published.
Today there's just so much that you have to find ways to differentiate signal from noise.
Yeah. Every time I scroll through my feet on Instagram, there's this new app,
and this company just changed the game in this market.
market like happens every day.
So, okay, we establish this.
I follow the right people.
What is the next step?
Are there like top three AI apps that I should be using?
Yeah, I mean, you know, I recommend obviously work you're off for testing yourself,
although it's mostly using corporations.
Other than that, you know, Deep learning.
has a lot of free content out there.
It's really good.
You also find that the LLMs can help you learn.
Like you can actually prompt the LLMs, but the bottleneck is people don't know what to ask
the LLM.
And that's where the assessment is so important.
Because at some point, you're going to be pretty good at AI.
And you're going to sort of have a wall in front of yourself.
Like, what do I do next?
Am I actually that good?
Do I know?
You know, to give you an example, at Stanford, we have, as you said, the class on campus with a lot of students.
And we have the class on YouTube, same content published on YouTube with a lot of views.
And those students would tell you that the difference between them and the Stanford kids is that it's not the material.
it's that they don't know how good they are.
The Stanford students, they have friends at OpenAI,
they have friends at Meta, they have friends at Google,
they have friends, they know how good they are compared to the bar.
How much does it take to get a job there?
But if you're somewhere in the world with no ecosystem,
you're not plugged in, it's really hard.
And so that's where the assessment is so important.
It can tell you, hey, actually, you thought you're pretty pretty good,
but that's not the bar.
The bar is actually higher.
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Top three questions that you should ask yourself to kind of understand your level.
How often do you use AI? If it's not daily, I think you're generally behind right now.
That's the simple one.
The other one is, you know, think about 10 products that use AI.
that you encounter in your daily life.
Can you come up with 10 products?
You know, and some people would realize,
like, actually, I don't realize where is AI?
Is it here? Is it there?
I don't know.
I don't have this ability to, like, identify AI.
You're probably behind.
If I want to start using AI for work,
what questions should I be asking myself?
I think when it comes to work,
a lot of the value of language models is in the context.
So for example, on chat GPT, there is this,
feature that allows you to give custom instructions to the model.
So hi, my name is Kean, I'm XYZ, I like to speak in English or in whatever language,
and I like to be concise or I like to, you know, whatever your style is.
That's an example of context that you give to the LLM.
It's like memory, right?
Yeah, memory that you give to the LLM.
Although yeah, memory is slightly different in context.
I can explain after, but, you know, and at work, you sort of
want your documents to be accessible to your LLM, if possible.
You want your custom instructions to be accessible.
You even want the custom instruction of your coworkers,
so that when you talk about your coworkers
or you're trying to send an email to XYZ, it will figure it out.
So the value of the LLM increases with the amount of context it has access to at work.
Is that how proficient organizations use AI?
Yeah, I'll give you a concrete example.
So at Workera, we are a big anthropic shop internally.
We use a lot of clods.
All our engineers are on this version of cloud called Cloud CodeMax,
which is very powerful to code.
And across the company, we have things that we call skills,
anthropic call these skills, where you can think of them as files
that define a certain way of doing a certain thing.
Like, here is how we recruit at Workera, or here is our brand guidelines.
This is the font we use, this is how we speak, these are the color palettes,
that you can use.
Before, if an engineer wanted to build a websites,
they would have to call the marketing team at the end
and say, can you review the font?
Can you review the alignment?
Can you review XYZ?
Today, because it's all coded,
you don't need anymore to talk to a human.
The engineer just asks the LLM,
can you just verify that the copywriting is correct?
The color palette is right.
And they know that the marketing team
has maintained that code.
I love that.
And so it cuts communication,
and it's very powerful.
You gain actually so much.
much speed and create so much more time for the marketing thing to think about, do we need to
change our font?
Do we need rather than like every day talk to an engineer and say, no, change that font, change
that font.
Do you check the result afterwards?
Like, oh.
Yeah, the engineer does.
Yeah, the engineers do.
Wow.
So now I'm very curious about your day-to-day as a founder.
What has changed in the past three years and how you just deal with your coworkers?
So you mentioned using Claude that cuts communication.
What else?
I would say one thing that has changed is we are getting flatter as an organization, which
means we have, for example, our head of AI decided to become an IC, an individual contributor
from a manager role.
And that didn't used to happen before.
And he's doing great as an individual contributor.
And he feels more productive and he feels like he's back close to the machine.
And I think that's a trend that we're going to see a lot.
The second aspect is, so in tech, you have this ratio of within a perfect team, how many engineers?
Do you have?
How many product managers?
Historically, you would have, I don't know, some Jeff Bezos calls it the two pizza team.
The team has to be able to eat two pizzas.
If it's more than two pizzas, the team is too big, basically.
Oh, this is grown beyond that.
And so right now, I think historically we've had, I don't know, eight engineers, one product manager, one product designer.
I think now it's getting way more efficient on the engineering side,
where you can actually probably put the team together with two engineers,
one product manager, one product designer,
and the engineers are very empowered to perform,
to build everything on their own almost with some input from the other parties.
And so we are seeing at work here, a lot of smaller teams.
Instead of having three big teams, we might have six, seven smaller teams
that have more ownership of their surface area.
We have, you know, transcriptions of meetings, which is really helpful because I can remember, you know, what was the context?
You know, we use our own product in our interviewing.
So there's an AI interviewer.
Oh, wow.
I think we just make all these tools accessible to our workforce.
And we make sure they adopt it very frequently.
Who does your calendar?
Is it AI now?
Every morning I have a briefing that my, so my assistant built AI systems herself.
and she has a little agent call it or a workflow that tracks my calendar and tracks what I know
or what past conversations I've had.
And every morning I get a briefing automatically in Slack that tells me this is where you
need to be and this is what you need to know, pretty much, which is really helpful, you know.
Yeah, everything that you described, if I won't the same in my company, do you think I need
to hire someone who's more AI native or my team can just handle it?
No, you should not.
Creatives and...
Yeah, I think you should start yourself.
It all starts by yourself.
So I think you should try it yourself and you will actually figure out that you can get a lot done by yourself.
And you're already very proficient, so it will be easier probably for you.
If you want to get in the technical realm, yeah, you will need someone more technical.
You need someone who has coded in the past.
You know, it's like you can get a lot more done.
But the basics like connecting documents and we should have done that months ago.
I think it's more about agency.
It's having agency to do that.
And that's agency.
I'm glad that you mentioned it because I was thinking a lot being here in Davos, everyone's talking about AI.
I was thinking about top three skills that everybody should be developing.
And I think you mentioned that in one of your talks.
There's some skills that die out really fast and some skills that just stay with you.
They have more longevity.
And I think agency is something that, you know, if we imagine AI is this bar, it's already telling some people what to do.
like they're kind of below AI.
Like if you work in customer support, right?
You just prompt something and you read it out loud.
Most of us are still beyond this line
because we're using AI as helper.
But this bar is rising.
What do you think?
And like the way to stay beyond it and make AI work for you,
not control you is to have agency,
maybe something else.
What do you think?
I mean, I'd say 100% agency is a durable skill.
We feel it.
Durable as in it will be useful,
even 10 years from now. It's very important. There's a lot more durable skill, critical thinking,
problem solving, effective communication. I think AI literacy is a durable skill. People will need it
for a long time. Coding, I think, is a very important durable skill.
Still, even for someone like me who's a podcast. I think, I think so. I don't think you'll have
to learn syntax. Like, you don't need to know how to code manually, but if you can tell if the coding
agent is, what is it doing, you have a significant advantage. You can catch you.
the errors faster, you can iterate faster. It is hard to negligent that. And then to come to the
top three skills, I think, like, it's separate in three groups. So for technical folks, very technical
folks, like foundational model level, right now companies are fighting for talent that can do
reasoning, that can build reasoning loops and reasoning models. There's very few people in the
world that can do it, and they're very, very valuable. The second one that's underrated,
forgotten, sometimes is distributed computing.
There's not that many people that can build clusters that can train models on massive clusters.
It is very complicated.
It requires a combination of math, skills, linear algebra, electrical engineering.
It's very, very complicated.
And those are, you know, hardcore engineers very valuable.
And then the third one is reinforcement learning.
So in AI, when you look at a model, it usually goes through different phases of training, like pre-training and post-training.
People that have, and at some point in the sometimes pre-training, sometimes post-training,
there are certain techniques from the world of reinforcement learning.
That's why the idea is like AlphaGo or chess.
Those games that you've seen AI play better, they're based on reinforcement learning methods.
When the machine learns by itself and tries different things.
It learns through experience, not through examples.
And that skill is also very valuable.
So that's the technical tier.
In the tier, applied tier, I would say forward deployed engineering is very,
very popular, meaning if you can also do business and be technical at the same time. That combination
is very rare. And then for day-to-day life, I think identifying AI, being able to use it natively is
the most popular skill for general awareness. Kean just talked about how most people use AI every
day, but their prompts are still super basic. Take my example. For months, I was struggling with
AI writing. It just didn't sound like me. It used the wrong words. It used the wrong tone.
tone, it invented facts, and overall sounded like AI.
So I decided to build a system.
Three files that teach AI, your real voice, real facts about your background,
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So do you see jobs market going down at all? Or was your projection for the next five years?
So a few things. I would say, one, people say Gen Z's, there's no job for Gen Z's. We've heard that
over the last couple of years. I think last year was definitely the hardest I've seen for university
grads. But was it about AI? Because a lot of people... I don't think so.
Yeah, overhiring during COVID.
I think companies have overhired during COVID.
And now they're saying AI is automating our stuff because it makes the stock go up.
The truth is they're performance managing a lot.
They're roaster managing.
They're exiting people.
And maybe there's a little bit of that job is not as important as it used to be.
But there's a lot of like we want to keep our best people and they hide it behind the AI lingua.
You know, why would meta exit people from their metaverse team if it was AI?
You know, no, it's because they wanted to make more out of that team
and he probably thinks they can get a lot more done
keeping the best people and getting them to work hard.
You know, otherwise you wouldn't have heard about the Metaverse team exiting people.
You would have heard of something else.
So I think it's really performance management that is happening.
And I think they don't find enough AI native talent.
The reason Gen Z has struggled to find jobs in the last year
is that there's just not enough AI native talent in the markets.
They're still just pockets that are in hubs.
And if you're in the hub, as a Gen Z, actually, you can do fairly well today.
There's good offers.
There's good opportunities.
When you're outside of the hub, it's very hard.
It's much more difficult.
So long story short, what I think is going to happen is over time, companies are going to figure out how to update their workflows.
So, yes, you will see productivity go up and you will see a lot of movement internally.
I think we're going to see more internal mobility than we've ever seen in our life.
It will be very common for you to start in the marketing team and go to the sales team,
starting the sales team and go to the HRVP team, whenever you need to move.
That's the movement inside the company is going to grow.
The company's total headcount, I think, is going to decrease.
I think on average companies are going to be slightly smaller, but it's not going to be a massive cut.
It's going to be, you know, every year, maybe they don't backfill people who retire.
They just don't hire more, you know.
Or if someone leaves, they probably try to do a culture.
refresh by bringing AI-native talent that is coming out of universities.
And at the same time, they invest in their talents to build AI-native mindset inside the company.
Do you think university loses its value in the next 10 years?
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think unless you're a top-tier university where you have brand defensibility,
people don't join for the content. They join for the network, the brands, the being surrounded,
by people that work hard, that are ambitious,
those will not lose their values.
So when you think about the university,
you think about a bundle.
Like universities have content, mentorship, research, blah, blah, blah,
you know, and that bundle will for sure change.
I think it's just, it's going to be a different offer.
Maybe it's not going to be four year bachelor's degree,
two years, master's, it's going to chair.
I think one of the weaknesses of universities today
is the mismatch of the job market skills needed.
Like you have too many universities that still teach skills
that you won't need.
You know, I come from France, and I recall when I was a student,
we had double the amount of physical educator being trained
and the amount of jobs available after they graduate.
You don't want a society that has that.
You want a society that has a zero skills gap.
At all points, the people that are joining a job market
have the exact skills that the market needs.
It's not an easy problem, but I think universities could be better at it.
Yeah, and it's really hard for universities to do that, right?
Super hard.
So, you have a program that's established.
One model is universities focused on durable skills.
And then companies build the capabilities to teach perishable skills.
So, for example, the problem is reasoning.
Reasoning, the people who know reasoning,
they're PhD students from the top AI labs in the world.
That's where they come from.
So it is coming from universities, generally.
Ideally, you would want all universities to give you AI native talents.
Everyone who graduates has amazing AI skills.
They're not specialized in a specific area, but they have great durable skills.
join the company, and the company has somehow a stack,
an HR and learning stack, that can take on board an employee,
and instead of them becoming a partner at a consulting firm in seven years,
they become in six months.
Yeah.
And that would be ideal.
And that's what you do at Worker, right?
Yeah, we help a lot of companies do that.
We do part of this problem, but the general idea is durable skills taught at school,
perishable skills taught at the company.
I love that.
This is exactly how universities should be working, right?
not only now, but also like 20 years ago,
because skills keep changing.
I think in WorkCarrer, you have AI agents, right,
that work in production,
and a lot of companies are failing to build those AI agents.
Also, we try, like in my company,
we have a media company, we're not that technical.
But from what I see, agents sound great,
but then in real world, it's still like a set of steps
that they're following and you still need a lot of human work.
Can you tell me why in your company they're working
and they're not working for a lot of other companies.
Yeah, for sure.
I think it is very, very hard to put an agent in production.
People don't realize that.
A demo is not a production agent.
You have demos are so easy to do now.
You see so many of them.
If you can tell the difference between a demo and a production system,
then you know how hard it is.
And that's why MIT's study said only 5% of agents work in production.
So I'll give you some examples.
The reason I think, so we've done large deployments,
One of the companies that is here, Bill McDermott, the CEO of ServiceNow is here.
ServiceNow uses Workera Enterprisewide.
So everybody is being measured, mentored, skills gap identified,
and they get sort of an AI drivering license, essentially, a certificate for the year.
That agent has been deployed very large scale.
For this to happen, you need, there's so many things that can go wrong.
Open AI can fail.
What do you do?
We have a model routing layer that allows us to route immediately to indeed,
next best model.
Translation, people have different languages.
It's not as easy as just saying,
oh, do the assessment in Japanese.
It's not at all as easy.
If a Japanese person looks at that,
they would say it has a lot of cultural gaps.
It is not culturally intelligent.
So it's so much hard work in there.
The agent has to be connected to the UI
and somehow the agent misses a button.
It just doesn't see it and then you're stuck.
Oh, the agent actually scored you very unfa
fairly. Your score should have been 200 and you got 150 and you don't agree with it. Well,
we have a feature that allows the person to say, I think the agent was wrong. And then you send
a human expert in the loop that we review within four business days and respond to the person.
We've upgraded your score and we've corrected the agent. And when you do that across thousands
and thousands of people, well, of course the agent gets better over time. And yeah, the first deployment
is a mess. The second one is a little bit less of a mess. And at some point you just build that
muscle of looking in between the lines and in the details, because that's what matters.
In a lot of cases, we even removed AI.
We realized that we started, we were like, everything has to be stochastic, meaning
sort of non-deterministic.
And then we got some feedback and users said, no, actually, I really like when part of
the experience is deterministic, where I don't need to be real time talking to the AI
interviewer because it stresses me out.
I want to take my pause and I want to be able to look at the
multiple choice question and take my time to check A.
That's not, you know, doesn't need like agentic AI.
And so we had to decide where do we do deterministic and where do we do stochastic.
Because stochastic allows you to understand the reasoning of the person.
You have a live conversation with an agent.
You can dig deeper in their thoughts.
But it's not always the right solution.
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Wow, so for what you're describing, it feels like in order to deploy an AI agent in your company,
you need a very technical person who can do the right reasoning and ask and pave the right path for that agent.
I think it's like, so companies now have these agent marketplaces.
Like you can go on their internal platform and create an agent with a prompt.
That is very different than building an agency company where the bar is just super high.
So for example, if you want to create a bot on Slack that reads a channel and summarizes it for you every day,
you don't need a team that is technical.
You now can have someone go on the marketplace of agents, hook it connected to Slack and tell it what to do.
it will do it. But we're building an AI agent that is supposed to be the best in the world at
measuring someone's skills to give them feedback. That's a different problem. You can't get it
wrong. The bar is extremely high. And there you need a research team. You need an applied team.
You need a product team. And talking about jobs, I feel like we need more and more people these
days because of all of the tools, all of the opportunities that open up. But do you think there will be
more companies? Because it's easier to start a company now. I think there will be more companies.
Is it going to help even out the market?
Yes, I think so. I think there will be more entrepreneurship, there will be more small businesses.
You know, last year I saw on X some of these vibe coding tools, I'm not going to say which one, people would know, did the marketing campaign saying, oh, one of our users rebuilt Calendley and rebuilt DocuSign in six hours, in six hours.
Where is that product who has used it? Nobody has ever used that product. Nobody has ever seen it. It's probably not even maintained.
anymore because what makes Calendley and DocuSign, by the way,
opened the new office in San Francisco and they're growing.
So what's interesting is if you don't have the best product,
if you're not significantly better than DocuSign,
why would I change to your product?
The bar is high.
Yes, it's easy to build a simple signature tool or calendar scheduling,
but your calendar is very actually powerful.
It has so many features.
And so the only way to replace that is if actually you build a product,
the product is not only as good, but actually
maybe 50% better for the cost of switching to be worth it for a user, 50% better.
And on top of that, you will have to make sure it keeps being 50% better.
Yeah, you do the right marketing as well.
So I don't buy this idea of personal software.
I don't buy that people are going to build their calendar and they're going to build blah, blah, blah.
I think some company will build a calendar lead that is 50% better than calendar that is AI native.
And everybody will use that agents.
And because you don't want to, you don't have the time.
don't have the time to build our personal software and maintain it.
You know, so I don't know.
I think it's just marketing campaigns.
Yes, totally makes sense in the next five years.
We just don't know what's going to happen in 10 years when AI is so good.
And it just gets all the knowledge, like, I don't know what I'm thinking about, the lawyers who are using AI.
Like AI, an AI tool has all the legal knowledge.
It's just so much better than anything.
For sure.
I agree it will be an AI agentic tool.
I just don't think there will be hundreds of them.
I think people will use the best.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I don't buy that there will be.
But it will be one major company, don't you think?
It will be, it will be.
It will probably be one of the top three or four.
I don't know, but you look like Callendley has built an amazing business.
There is a feature that is the exact replica of Callendley in Google.
Exactly. So how did they build that business?
Because there's still a need for innovation in that niche, you know.
I don't think we will be using thousands of agents in the future, like you and I.
I think we will be using a smaller number that are specialized and the teams
behind it make them consistently better, continuously better.
Not only it will have the ability to teach itself, but there will be a user feedback loop
so that they get the UI right, they get the UX right, they get the lingua rights, you know.
These things are very important at the end of the day.
Yeah, it sounds very positive for entrepreneurship.
Because sometimes as an entrepreneur, when I think about AI, if AI can identify the problem,
like when it comes to Amazon Marketplace, for example, identify the product where demand
and it's more than supply, ship it from China automatically and just sell it.
It makes me a little sad.
But from what you said, because it takes a human to constantly improve something and think about the details and innovate.
And that's the defensibility is not the software.
It's not going to be the code because that's easy.
It's the expertise that it put into it.
And the founder and the user feedback, the agency of the founding team, you know, things like that matter more.
And that's what makes them win.
I love it.
Okay, for everyone who is listening, our audience is 25 to 40 years old.
They all want to become better in the age of AI, build something.
What are the three moves that they should make in 2006?
Learn the foundations of AI.
Assess yourself to make sure you're ready.
Build the habits of learning.
Like, every day when you wake up, take five minutes,
read the ex-posts of the people that you trust.
in the space.
And it turns out, you know, you won't feel better after a week,
but you will feel a lot better after you're,
you'll feel like you're probably at the cutting edge.
You know, someone said I saw like, you know,
if you focus on one thing for a day,
you probably are already in the top, you know, X percent of the world in that thing.
If you focus on it for a week nonstop, you're in the top 10 percent.
Focus on the month, you're in the top 1%.
But to be in the top 0.1%, you will have to build that habit and follow it for five,
10 years and you might be the top 0.1% at what you're trying to do.
I love that.
I also like your point about joining a hub because this helps you evaluate yourself against
other people and compare notes and learn from each other.
Maybe start locally and then, you know, change groups.
Yeah, I think especially if you're early in your career, today, hubs have a significant
advantages because, so, you know, AI started in the Silicon Valley pretty much the, I guess,
the new wave of AI agents.
So companies came.
So there was more opportunities.
So more people came.
Because more people came, more companies came.
And now if you're in San Francisco,
you don't even need to put an effort to learn what's happening in AI.
I go out at the dinner.
We talk about voice AI somehow.
People talk about Tesla Autonomous autopilets.
You just learn constantly because you're in the hub.
I think in the next few years it will be like that.
The hubs are way advanced compared to the rest.
But I think that in the next five,
10 years horizon, you know, people will get slightly older.
They would want to build families.
They will leave the hubs, a lot of them.
They will take that knowledge with them.
They will probably start building somewhere else.
Local hubs, yeah.
Exactly.
And that's what happened in the dot-com when software engineering was concentrated.
And a few years later, actually it became democratized because of online learning,
because of access to information, but also because a lot of these experts moved elsewhere.
And I think the same thing will happen in 10 years.
Even outside the hubs, you will find great AI native microhubs or local,
communities. Yeah, that's amazing. Thank you so much for this conversation. I love podcast.
When after the podcast, I'm going to just text my team. We're going to build the clot thing.
We're going to make sure we have all of the documents, everything synced. Thank you so much.
Love this feeling. Let's get to work. Thank you.
Keen is the reason why I came back home from Davos and started implementing clot across everything
that I do. We set up multiple clot projects for all the social media that we're running.
And honestly, it's been so transformational.
Another conversation that's been really transformational was my conversation that I recorded Davos with Ryan Roslanski.
So if you're all about AI, if you're interested, what's happening to jobs and how you can get a better job by posting on LinkedIn, watch that episode.
It's live on my channel.
And I'll see you very soon.
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