Artificial Intelligence

How to Win With AI in 2026

June 7, 2026
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Written by Claude AI

Key insights:

  • Break every role into 4 to 10 observable tasks, then convert those tasks into workflows instead of headcount.
  • Train AI like a new employee using concrete rules, sample outputs, and 100 fast feedback cycles, not vague one-shot prompts.
  • Bet on a barbell strategy: lean into AI skills on one side, and industries tied to human bodies, food, and entertainment on the other.

Why AI adoption is now your top priority

AI will never be worse than it is right now. If you assume any rate of improvement over any reasonable time period, learning how to use AI should become your number one priority, your number two priority, and your number ten priority.

This is not fearmongering. This is preparation. The shift coming to Main Street, not just tech, will be the biggest business shift in decades.

The good news? Most people are still asleep at the wheel. That gives you a window. A real one.

What does AI first actually mean?

Everyone uses the phrase. Few live it. Being AI first means starting day one with workflows powered by agents instead of headcount.

Some newer companies are now hitting revenue per employee in the millions per year per head. Why? Because they never built the bloated org chart in the first place.

When you already have a big team, change is painful. People resist new tools. Managers avoid hard conversations about roles that no longer need to exist.

If you are starting fresh, you have an unfair advantage. Use it.

Why is there zero net job creation in the private sector?

Jerome Powell recently noted there is effectively zero net job creation in the private sector. The economy is not weak. Jobs are being automated away quietly.

This is happening before most business owners notice. By the time they do, the competitive gap will already be wide.

If you want to stay ahead, you need to act now, not after the headlines confirm what is already obvious.

How do you stop fearing AI and start using it?

People delay the first hour for decades. It takes about 20 hours to become proficient in any new skill. A single weekend of hands on work will teach you more than a year of reading articles.

Block off a Saturday and Sunday. Sit at your computer. Build one agent. Break something. Fix it. By Sunday night your understanding will be ahead of 95 percent of your peers.

The short term cost of learning is small. The long term cost of avoiding it is your career.

Shift from role based thinking to workflow based thinking

The old paradigm says, I need to hire an editor. The new paradigm asks, what are the five things an editor actually does, and which of those can become a workflow?

Every business takes raw inputs, adds a special sauce, and produces a more valuable output. Organize the inputs and outputs, not the humans.

How do you break a role into workflows?

For every hire you are considering, write down the four to ten things that person does with their hands, eyes, and mouth. Real, observable tasks.

Then ask if each activity could live inside a workflow instead of inside a headcount slot.

  • Writes scripts
  • Reviews footage
  • Cuts rough drafts
  • Adds captions
  • Publishes to platforms

Each of those can be a workflow. Some can be fully automated today. Others can be partly automated with a human in the loop.

Should you automate your own job?

Yes. If you are not automating your own job, you are missing the boat.

A smart entrepreneur recently spun up a division inside his company with one mission: to put his larger business out of business. He would rather disrupt himself than be disrupted.

Take 20 percent of your time and aim it at automating what you do today. If you do not, someone else will eventually do it to you.

What is the BYO future of work?

The medium term future is BYOA, bring your own agent. Imagine walking into a company and saying, I am your entire marketing department, because you bring a stack of trained agents with you.

Anthropic reportedly runs marketing with one person. That person is not doing everything manually. They have built and trained agents that do most of the work.

This opens new earning paths:

  1. Start an agency built around agent workflows
  2. Embed inside a company for equity
  3. Negotiate higher cash compensation by replacing whole functions

None of these options existed at this scale until now. If you want to build the skills to step into roles like this, the Complete RPA Bootcamp teaches you RPA, agentic automation, coded automation, and computer use agents from beginner to pro.

Train AI the way you would train a new employee

Most people give an AI one prompt, get a bad output, and quit. If a new hire did the same thing on day one, you would not fire them. You would train them.

AI is the same. The output you get reflects the training you gave.

Why is reinforcement the secret to training AI?

Humans learn through reinforcement. You do a thing, you get an outcome, and you adjust. Good outcomes get repeated. Bad ones get dropped.

People with good taste are just pattern recognizers who were rewarded for spotting and communicating patterns. Computers are even better at pattern recognition than humans.

So train them the way you should train humans. Define what good looks like. Reward correct patterns. Correct mistakes. Repeat.

How do you write better prompts for AI?

Remove emotional and vague words. Words like charisma, lighter, energetic mean nothing to an agent. Replace them with observable behaviors and concrete rules.

Instead of write good copy, give it:

  • 12 rules it can never break
  • 16 writing samples from you
  • A clear definition of the target output

Then iterate 100 times. With a human, 100 feedback cycles might take 18 months. With AI, it can take 100 minutes.

What happens if you do not adopt AI?

Some people still use fax machines. Some still count on their fingers. They are not winning because of those choices. They are winning despite them.

Humans plus superior technology always beat humans with inferior technology. Stone age to bronze age. Bronze to iron. Iron to digital. The pattern is unbroken.

As long as you compete with humans plus tools against humans with other tools, you can still win. The day you try to beat the machine alone, you lose.

Where to place your bets in an AI driven economy

In a world of infinite intelligence and near zero labor cost, the most valuable thing a human can do is take risk. That does not get automated away.

The smart move is a barbell strategy. Lean hard into AI on one side, and lean into things that will not change on the other.

What industries will survive the AI shift?

Bet on what stays true about humans. They will still have bodies. They will still need food. They will still need entertainment.

  • Health: healthcare, fitness, longevity
  • Consumables: food, supplements, daily essentials
  • Entertainment: content, media, immersive experiences

As more work gets automated, humans gain more leisure time. Entertainment will boom because leisure expands and entertainment is cheap to produce.

One creator can now make a full motion picture using AI tools. The cost basis has dropped faster than market prices. That gap is where new fortunes get made.

Why is pricing slow to adjust to AI cost savings?

Customers are slow to adapt. If they have been paying $2,000 a month for a service, they expect to keep paying that. Embedded in that price is the old cost of labor.

If you can deliver the same outcome for $50 a month in real cost, the margin is enormous. Even better, the operational leverage is massive. One person can produce millions in revenue without armies of coordinators.

Coordination between humans is one of the biggest hidden costs of scaling. Cut it, and scaling gets dramatically easier.

How do you make the AI vs human phase shift work for you?

Brian Johnson described it well. You have trained your whole life to swim. You got good at it. Now the water is about to boil and turn into gas. No matter how well you swim, the physics of the environment will have changed.

The people who win will not be the best swimmers. They will be the ones who noticed the phase shift early and learned to operate in the new medium.

That is what learning AI today is really about. Not a side skill. A new way of working entirely.

Your action plan starting today

You have heard the case. Now make it real. The biggest mistake is to feel motivated and do nothing with it.

Here is the exact sequence to follow this week.

How do you list every task you do?

Write down everything you do every day at the most granular level. Not I run ads. Break that into:

  1. Build campaigns
  2. Set budgets
  3. Analyze results
  4. Write ad copy
  5. Design creative
  6. Test landing pages
  7. Test headlines

Do this for every chunked up label you have ever given yourself. The smaller the task, the easier it is to automate.

How do you automate your first task with AI?

Take the first task on your list. Open your AI tool. Type, Help me automate this. What steps would you take?

It will give you a list. Take the first step and do it. If you get stuck, screenshot your screen, paste it in, and ask, What do I do now? Repeat until done.

Everyone has an AI tutor at their fingertips. Almost no one uses it that way.

If you want a structured path instead of figuring it out alone, the Complete RPA Bootcamp walks you through RPA, agentic automation, coded automation, and computer use agents step by step. You go from beginner to Automation Developer, switching to a career that builds the AI instead of being replaced by it.

What should you do next as an employee or owner?

If you own a business, raise the bar for your whole team. The people who can meet the new bar stay. The ones who cannot, do not. That is hard. It is also reality.

If you are an employee, become the person who automates the work around you. Be the one who controls the automation, not the one who gets controlled by it.

If you are starting out, build AI first from day one. Skip the bloated org chart. Hire workflows before you hire humans.

For more on the mindset and tactics behind this shift, watch the full breakdown in the video below from the Alex Hormozi YouTube channel. He lays out the framework that makes all of this click, and pairing it with hands on skills from the Complete RPA Bootcamp puts you on the right side of the phase shift coming in 2026.