Jason M. Lemkin tells revenue leaders to stop learning about AI and start building with it. Deploy a simple agentic product yourself, train it, and iterate. Hands-on experience puts you ahead of 90% of professionals and keeps you employable.
Chapters
Like, no, you need to do AI. I recently had a CRO I've worked with for years, the deepest respect, reach out to me in an almost panicked email. I need to learn AI, right? I'll do anything. I'll intern for you. I'll hang out with Amelia's office. I'll do whatever. And I hear this all the time. I need to learn AI. We hear it all. I need to learn AI, Craig. It's important for my job. It's the simplest advice tied to all this. Like, no, you need to do AI. Do it. Don't learn it. The way you're going to do it is pick an agent, an Agentic product. Pick the simplest possible one, use case. And I know it can be scary for some people. Deploy it yourself. If you deploy an agent yourself, train it, QA it, test it, you will be ahead of 90% of the world. Hands-on. Yeah, yourself, not your team. And don't learn it. Don't learn it. You know, we do so many Workshop Wednesdays with CMOs that are like, oh, we encourage our team to use any AI tool they want. Like we allow them to try Perplexity if they want and we 'You should encourage them to learn recipes online.' I'm like, you will never learn a go-to motion in today's— you gotta do it, right? But if you don't do it hands-on keyboard, you will not have a job. And literally, I'll give you another example, then I want to hear yours. For example, one of the— another CMO who I love, I've gotten her her last two jobs. Obviously I recommended her. Just reached out after many years, she's ready for her third. And I'm like, 'I don't mean to be mean, I got nothing for you.' I was really direct. I'm like, 'Can I be honest with you?' It's like, yeah, I always trust you, Jason. I got nothing for you. I gave you 5 ideas. I got nothing for you. Why? You don't know this stuff yet. You don't know this stuff yet. You go out and deploy an agent. Tell me how it worked. Tell me how the training went. Any of the issues, come back to me. I'll get you 2 jobs. I got nothing. I got nothing for her.
