Inc. Magazine
AI won’t replace your job, but mastering it will set you apart. Just like the “Learn to Code” movement flooded the market with unskilled coders, AI courses risk doing the same. Focus on honing creativity, problem-solving, and expertise—skills AI can’t replicate—for long-term success, not just quick fixes.
Author: Joe Procopio
I saw the ad in one of my social media feeds and it immediately infuriated me. I wish I had screencapped it, but I had already rage-closed my browser. Doesn’t matter though, the words were burned into my brain.
“AI won’t take your job. But the person who knows how to use AI will.”
The ad in question was for a fly-by-night online AI training company because of course it was. Well, just to show you that I’m a good guy and impartial, let me save you a few hundred bucks on what these courses teach you about AI.
Do you know how to search google? Do the same thing with one of the major AI providers and expect less.
You keep using that word, AI. I do not think it means what you think it means.
As someone who has been there building software platforms to help people contextualize data by using automation to generate insights—particularly at a company aptly named “Automated Insights,” let me tell you what we should do to keep our jobs instead of wasting money on prompt engineering courses.
Get better at everything AI shouldn’t be doing
Which is a lot.
I don’t need to explain this to you. Over the last six months or so, as more people have come to understand what AI really is, when I say something like what I just said, people have stopped scoffing and started nodding.
But if you’re still keeping AI at arms length, like an outsider staring into the AI storefront window and wondering how the magic happens, I’ll nutshell it.
AI platform providers took all the world’s available data, chunked it, scattered it, smothered it, covered it, then put it in the cloud, and dumbed it way down with a resource-intense retrieval method so that it can provide generic answers conversationally. They’re still tweaking what’s called RAG for specific knowledge and agents for decision-making.
And yes, AI can do everything you can do, don’t fight that argument.
Fight the argument that it can do those things well.
This won’t be an easy argument to win. Disappointingly, entire businesses, hell, even entire industries, are redefining the rules of how they operate and measure success to conform to the hypothesis that computers are an adequate, if not superior alternative to human ingenuity.
And with that in mind, we’ve been here before.
This is the “Learn To Code” pitch all over again
Hey. AI learning course guy? Do you have any idea what it takes to really “learn AI”?
It’s a lot. I can assure you.
Way back in the dark ages of 2021, I wrote a piece calling for an end to the “Learn to Code” movement. I wrote that for the very same reasons I’m politely asking everyone to stop telling people to “Learn AI.”
(And this was four years ago so some of it was off, but I feel like I got most of it right.)
TL;DR: Instead of telling ambitious folks to essentially spend years of their lives and a ton of money drilling down into the minutiae of code and syntax, instead, take a hard look at how “coding” itself is evolving to produce options like no-code, and leave the hardcore coding to the hardcore engineers.
As an aside, no one ever says, “Learn To Perform Surgery!”
To put it more bluntly, the problem I had with “Learn To Code” being tossed out like a mantra, is that instead of creating hordes of shitty coders, we should have been advising non-coders to focus on those soft skills that separate good coders from terrible coders, and push the non-technical folks to no-code and low-code tools that would allow them to put their skills and passions into practice—or maybe even build a real business instead of organizing a study group.
Fast forward to today. We’ve already inadvertently created a class of “AI talent” that knows how to code with GitHub Copilot. This is not going to create better code for better apps for better business outcomes.
It’s doing a great job creating AI slop but with code – just like “Learn To Code” created a workforce of terrible coders, who are now easy targets to be replaced by AI slop coders.
Damn this vicious cycle.
There’s also some “Learn SaaS” lessons here
Here’s where you can get the roadmap of what to do instead.
I’ve also made the case several times over—and been lambasted for it—that as a “product person,” I don’t want to be beholden to Scrum and Jira and be forced to conform to the methodology that Agile has become.
Yes, those were meant to be helper tools and a manifesto, but In the real world what happened was they became an inflexible structure that more often than not is producing crap features at speed for bloated apps that no one is willing to pay loftier subscription fees for the enterprise version.
A scenario that is also the impetus for mass layoffs.
Or maybe we should revisit the over-reliance on marketing techniques like SEO, tools like Hubspot and Google Analytics, and business intelligence platforms that require teams of “knowledge workers” to squeeze actual insights out of overloaded databases – all to put reports in front of someone who actually knows how to market and sell, you know, to actually do something with that data.
Nope. More layoffs.
When are we going to “Learn From History”?
Instead of becoming an expert on the helper tools, become an expert on the things we use those tools for to create successful outcomes.
I don’t feel like I’m tilting at windmills here. This is common sense, right?
AI is a welcome and probably overdue advancement in the processing power of computer chips. That’s it. The “intelligence” has been gathering dust on the internet for decades, inaccessible in a general context. Now it’s available to me and you. It’s amazing. But also very, very nascent.
And I get it, it always takes a minute and a lot of mistakes for business leaders to see a tool as a tool and not as a threat. And there will always be external factors—like remote work, like a dying innovation cycle, like the onboarding of a new generation—that make leaders make rash decisions.
Instead of dreading science fiction, we need to embrace science. Use the tool when you need it and focus on learning the craft. And if you’re interested in craft, that’s what I talk about. So please join my email list and follow along.
Credits: TCA, LLC.