YOU CAN’T AFFORD TO HIRE PEOPLE WHO IGNORE AI

29 Sept 2026 · 1 min

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1:17

In this short commentary, Eric Siu argues that modern companies must hire "AI‑pilled" people—individuals with high agency, a strong relationship to change, relentless learning habits, a bias toward action, bold long‑term self‑bets, and unreasonably resilience. He contrasts these AI‑pilled workers with traditional "barrel" employees who merely execute tasks without leveraging AI. Siu explains that AI is a leverage tool: when applied to already smart, adaptable workers, it dramatically amplifies their output, creating compounding productivity gains. Conversely, workers who cling to manual, task‑focused methods miss out on this leverage and fall behind. The core message is that hiring AI‑pilled talent is essential for companies to stay competitive, and Siu invites viewers to follow for more insights on AI marketing and business.

Chapters

You can only afford to hire AI-pilled person because that AI-pilled person is someone who has high agency and they have a good relationship to change. And so, the way you approach the world now is you're hanging out on X, you're seeing all the new stuff that's happening and you're figuring out how do you apply that to how you do work, right? You are a relentless learner. You have a strong bias to action. You make bold long-term bets on yourself and you're unreasonably resilient, which means you keep pushing through. And we live in a world today where you can no longer just be someone that just does a bunch of tasks. That doesn't work anymore, right? You can only afford to be a barrel, meaning that you're someone that just makes things happen. And so when you imagine that you have a company full of barrels who just make things happen, they build workflows and they manage these workflows and they keep compounding, keep compounding, keep compounding. How are they going to stack up to someone who's working in a traditional way, who still wants to do tasks manually, who still wants to write their code manually by hand? They want to review it all manually. They don't want to add any leverage to what they're doing because AI is ultimately a tool that provides leverage. If you put leverage on something that is smart, something that is good, it's going to become way more powerful. And so that's why it's so important to hire those AI-pilled people because these people are the smart people that have worked on themselves already and you add leverage to that and it blows up in a good way. Follow for more on AI marketing and business.