My Friend Runs a $500M/Year Business, And He's Using Broken AI

So let's talk about what actual businesses are doing with AI right now to generate revenue. Not enough people are talking about it. We work with a ton of them. A ton of my friends are part of these companies, if not co-founders of these companies. I want to talk about the real, real and what you could do about it to generate revenue with AI. So what I got on the screen right now, this is a study from McKinsey. Sure, it's in 2025. It's a little dated, but the general premise of it is correct. If you look at most of the dots here, you have 88% of these companies using AI chatbots and copilots. Okay, then you have 5% who are not using AI at all. Then you have 6% of these dots, okay, of 1,300 companies who are capturing enterprise-wide AI value, and they have less than 1% that are running autonomous AI systems. Okay, I'm going to give you a couple examples. I'm going to tell you what you can do to, to get ahead of this. So one of my friends, they do about, let's just say, $500 million a year or so. Okay, they know that the vast majority of their companies are not on top of AI. I will tell you, most CEOs right now, most founders, unfortunately, what I'm getting from a lot of text messages— I get one text message every single week. Just recently, this company doing $500 million a year, they're like, we're looking at making some pretty drastic cuts. I'm like, what percent of people are you going to cut? Like, probably, you know, 30%, 35% or so. And these are non-technical people. So they're looking at the non-technical people that aren't AI native and they're going to be cutting. And that for them is probably around, let's call it like 400 or 500 people or so. It's a lot of people. Okay. You look at Block, I think they cut what, 40%? It might have been 4,500 people or so that they cut. Jack Dorsey cited, you got AI coming, right? There's a lot of efficiencies coming. You'd rather get ahead of it right now. Let's give them, you know, 6 months of severance. Let's help them find like their next thing, right? So I would say first and foremost, what's happening with these enterprises right now, they are looking to cut. Some of them are using AI as an excuse. But I will tell you that, you know, my friend that runs that $500 million a year company, you know, they are pushing very hard on AI fluency. They actually have an AI skunkworks team that is actually looking to make things efficient in terms of all their software spend. They made a replacement for a call recording tool, okay? This call recording tool, they're basically at the 1-yard line from signing a million-dollar contract for the year. And that AI team is like a crack team of interns that are maybe like 18, 19 years old or so. They built the solutions to replace a lot of the systems that they're paying for. They're just looking for efficiencies. I would say they're looking for ways to not so much replace people first and foremost, but more so to replace processes. Because everything that you do within AI or just business in general, you're paying for a process, you're paying for a workflow. They're looking to make these workflows more efficient. That's what they're trying to do. So those are a couple of examples for you. And I would say my company, for example, at Single Grain, we're driving AI fluency throughout the organization. So Claude code is mandated. And I have a few other friends where they have AI adoption, you know, matrixes. Zapier, for example, they have 4 levels where they're looking at employees and measure them on performance. Number 1, unacceptable. So obviously unacceptable is not okay. So you're probably going to be fired. Okay. Number 2 would be capable. So capable is like maybe they're using ChatGPT, maybe they're using Claude Cowork a little bit. Number 3 would be you have someone who is adaptable. So adaptable is someone who is— they are maybe building agentic workflows, maybe they're using N8N, maybe they're using Claude Code a little bit. Then you have transformative. Transformative, these people are building end-to-end workflows, right? And when I say end-to-end, that means that, hey, We're looking to hire this role right now. Okay. Ask me a bunch of questions about the role. Okay. Go out and do it. Okay. It's going to give you a bunch of people at the end for you to review. And that, that to me is end-to-end because it's lead generation for recruiting. You can also do that for sales too. And so if you're able to do that right now at a company, you're considered transformative. Where am I going with all this? I believe if you're watching this right now, if you're a leader within your company, you have to be driving AI fluency from the very bottom. Okay. You have to create the conditions for success for your company, bring people to the water, and it's their job to drink. Okay. So that's your job as a leader in your company. Also, as a leader in your company, your job is to learn the latest that's happening right now on X. Every day I feel like I'm behind. I'm learning the latest in Claude Code. I'm learning the latest in OpenCLAW. I'm running all these things for my business. Literally, today's a Sunday. I'm recording this YouTube video, but right after this, I'm on the couch. I can't even stand watching TV anymore. I'm pulling out my phone. I just start dictating on Super Whisper to my Telegram, which has all my different agents in there, or inside of Slack. Hey, what if we build this over here? How do we make our YouTube process more efficient? Hey, how do we build workflows for workflows? Every single thing that you want, you should be figuring out how to make workflows for it and then figuring out how you can hand those off to other people. And then what you should be doing is you should have these agents start to invade Slack and then work with your team, collaborate with your team so everyone can get better, right? So you have a bottoms-up approach where you're driving AI fluency throughout the organization and top-down, you're working with your leaders, you're doing it yourself. And then once you figure out the process, have your agents invade Slack and have your agents work with your team because your agents are working with you all the time. They're probably one of your closest friends right now, or that's probably your closest group of friends, I would say. So that's what companies are doing right now to drive actual adoption and drive revenue. And by the way, people don't care about, oh, I connected it with my calendar. I want real meetings booked. I want real SEO pages created. I want real content created. What you see on the screen right now, by the way, this was completely AI generated. It just watched some content that I had. And I'm like, hey, I really like these dot charts. Can you just make me more dot charts? Stupid prompt. Very stupid prompt. Okay, 53,000 views. Not bad. And these are the types of views that I want because I know that people that are interested in this is quality people because this ties in with business directly. So I want more stuff like this. By the way, this is the last thing. Money amplifies your nature. AI amplifies your intelligence. I'm going to say that again. Money amplifies your nature. AI amplifies your intelligence. You only have 0.04% of people using coding scaffolds right now, meaning Claude Code, and only 0.3% of people are paying $20 a month. If you can get here, you're going to be unstoppable. As of this video right now, Claude Code has gotten way more powerful maybe 8, 9 weeks ago or so. Open Claude maybe got really popular, I want to call it like 6, 7 weeks ago or so. And then just now we're piloting on 2 clients right now, but we're all in on our own stuff. The cool thing is if you try this for yourself and you build the scaffolding, you're going to be doing this for your customers as well. If you're looking to hire a marketing agency in today's day and age, you have to be looking at what their AI fluency looks like. When you ask them, hey, like what cool things have you built with AI? What are you automating right now? What is your team using? If they're like, oh yeah, our team loves ChatGPT, we pay $20 a month, gone. Okay, if you say you're using Claude Code, and you're actually building solutions for your clients, you're building dashboards, you are running, you know, you're creating thousands of ads, you're creating, you know, hundreds of campaigns, and you're measuring them quickly. And you're doing this at scale. That's the type of stuff that you want to hear as a leader. Real quick, if you want to acquire customers faster and more efficiently this year with the latest strategies and tactics, then check out singlegrain.com. That is my ad agency. Again, www.singlegrain.com. Check it out. And if it seems like a fit, we'll get in touch and help you with a free marketing plan. Yeah. So if you want to work with us, you can just go to singlegrain.com and you can just hit the button over there. Say you're interested in AI implementation. Say you watch one of the videos and that's the best way to move forward. If you want to learn how to use AI at $100K, $500K, $1 million, $10 million, $100 million plus, you got to check out this video over here to learn more.