Practical AI · Episode 55

How AI Native Are You, Really?

Seven levels. Find yourself honestly, then take the one move out of it. The honest read is usually one level lower than the flattering one.

The seven levels

0Outsider
“I don’t really use it for work.”

Work happens the way it always has. This is almost never ignorance. It is that nobody ever showed you a use that was obviously yours, so it stayed a novelty you did not have ten minutes for.

The one moveOne task, this week. The one you dread most, done badly by AI, still beats not started.
A1Explorer
“I’ve tried it. I use it when I remember.”

A couple of good moments and no habit. Every time you open it you start from scratch, because you have not found the two or three jobs that are clearly yours.

The one moveWrite one prompt down in a file. Not in your head, not in the chat window. One you will use again.
A2Adopter
“I use it for specific things every week.”

You found your two or three and you use them reliably. But each one is a separate errand. Nothing connects. This is where most people are, and it is a comfortable place to stall, because from the outside it looks like fluency.

The one moveConnect two. Make the output of one job the input to the next, so it becomes a sequence instead of two errands.
B1Practitioner
“AI is how I work. I have a system.”

The big jump, and the first level you cannot fake. You have prompts you wrote and kept and you reuse them without thinking. What you do not have yet is proof. You believe it is working and you would struggle to say by how much.

The one movePick one number and write it down before and after. Twenty minutes of research down to five is a real number.
B2Optimizer
“I test what works and I know my numbers.”

You stopped improving by instinct. Version one against version two, keep the winner, point at something real that moved. This is the rarest rung on the ladder, and almost no framework anywhere even asks about it.

The one moveWrite down how it works, in enough detail that somebody else could run it without asking you a question.
C1Builder
“Other people use what I built.”

Your system got good enough that it left your desk. The difference from the level below is not skill. It is that you made it legible to somebody else, which is a communication act, not a technical one.

The one movePut one of them on a timer. Take the thing you do every Monday and let it run Sunday night.
C2Architect
“AI is my operating system.”

Work happens while you are not there. Things run, report back, and wait for your judgement rather than your labour. You have not automated yourself out of a job. You moved to the twenty percent that actually needed you.

The one moveTeach it. The bottleneck is no longer your capability, it is everyone else’s.

The tell that works at any level

A beginner describes something they have. Someone at the top describes something that happened, while they were not in the room.

One thing worth knowing before you rate yourself

When people rate themselves they are wrong, and they are wrong in one direction. Five thousand knowledge workers were tested. 54 percent said they were proficient. 10 percent were.

We see the same shape in our own numbers. Nobody puts themselves in the bottom half of this scale. When somebody else does the assessing, most people land there.

That is not people lying. On a quiz nobody is watching and nothing is at stake. We are not dishonest about this. We are wrong about it in private.

Funding · Week 40

Where The AI Money Went

$4.87B across 75 AI companies, and not one round above $700M. Up about 36% on last week once you strip last week’s one billion-dollar round, and it got there without a single mega-round of its own.

Open the report →
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