99% of People Have No Idea What’s About to Happen With AI

99% of people have no idea what's about to happen with AI. Most people think they're ahead because they switched to Claude or tried some new AI tool their cousin told them about. That's like upgrading from a flip phone to an iPhone 4 in 2026. What's coming with AI is bigger than the internet, bigger than smartphones, bigger than Bitcoin. And the gap between people who see it and the people who don't is growing every single day. I build AI tools and AI companies all the time, and what shifted in the last few months has made me rethink everything about AI. How I work, how I build, and how I run my businesses. So I'm going to show you where the 3 levels of AI exist right now, where 99% of people are getting stuck and they don't even know it, where a small group of people are quietly getting ahead of everyone else and it's growing, and the absolute cutting edge, the frontier, where the next wave of billionaires is being made right now in real time. Starting with level 1, the assistants. Most people just figured out ChatGPT isn't the only AI tool. They're switching from Claude, they're trying Gemini. Maybe they heard of Perplexity. That's a good first step, but it's just that, a first step. At this level, AI is a really smart assistant sitting next to you. It can create images, research, emails, designs, stuff that used to take hours or you had to pay other people to do it. Done in minutes. Awesome sauce. But you still have to do the work. You might be faster, you can do more, but you're still the one doing it. One of the most common questions I get around AI is, hey, Dan, what tools should I be using? Here's what I recommend right now. These are the tools that I use. Screenshot this. Whisperflow helps me talk into an AI assistant. It's a game changer. Claude Cowork, automate things on my computer. Manus, pretty much do end-to-end complete workflows. Claude Code, it's what I use to build custom solutions. And OpenClaw, it's the wrapper around it all. And I have my own variant called Apex. We'll get to that in a second. So now you just realize you shouldn't just be using one AI tool. You should be using many depending on the job. Using those tools I just showed you, that's great. They're incredible. They will change your life. But it's still just the beginning. It's kind of like being in the kiddie pool. And if you don't pay attention to what I'm about to share next, you will fall behind. I promise you this. There is no future where AI doesn't exist, and it does way more for you than what you think. That's level 1. It's a start, but it's just the beginning because level 2, you stop doing the work entirely. Level 2 is the agent operators. ChatGPT has almost 6 billion visits a month. A tool like Manus, one of the most popular agentic AI tools in the world, gets 18 million. There's a big discrepancy. That's only 0.3% of all those people using ChatGPT on Manus. Almost nobody is here yet. Do you understand this? Level 2, you give AI a goal. It plans the steps, it executes the step, it shares that with the people you're about to share with it. It gets feedback on what you shared and then updates itself. It's tools like Manus, Claude Code, Claude Cowork. Entire projects are handled by the AI. Essentially, in that mode, you are the agent operator, okay? You configure it. You're like the project manager of all these virtual AI agents. You gotta pick the tool, you gotta assign it the job, you gotta check the outputs, you gotta figure out the data connectors. And I even did a whole video on Manus where you can use it to like run and manage your business. I'll link it at the end. So today I wanna break down what actually changes between level 1 and level 2. First, let's compare the touchpoints, like how many times you have to touch the AI to get it to do the thing. On level 1, you have many because you're still the person doing it all. You just have different tools for every task. On level 2, you only have a few because you have one specialty tool or AI per job type. Now let's compare what the AI does. See, in level 1, it helps you do the work, right? Write copy, do research, competitive analysis. In level 2, it does the whole work for you. Not only the pieces, but it puts the whole thing together as a complete work product. Now let's compare what you do in these levels. Level 1 is everything. If you don't, do anything, it won't do anything. Okay? It might make you faster, but it's still you. In level 2, you can give it a prompt, walk away, you manage the tool, but when you come back, trust me, it'll complete something for you. It'll build you an app, it'll create a presentation, it'll do the competitor analysis. It does the whole thing. You essentially just assign a task, you check what it did, and then you can repeat it if you need to make some changes. By the way, if you're a business owner and you need your team to get up to speed with AI, I've got a free AI cheat sheet that covers everything. Which tools to use, the core principles behind AI, how to prompt it so that you actually get great responses. So instead of you worrying about AI replacing your people, how about get them using it to get 10 times more done? Just DM me the word YouTube AI on Instagram and I'll send it to you. Now that's level 2, and it's crazy in its own right. Okay, you've gone from doing the work to managing the workers, and honestly, most people would be set if they just stopped here. But there's another level, and this next one will take you from having an advantage over most people to having one over absolutely everyone. Level 3 is the organization. Level 2 was 0.3% of all AI users. Level 3 is 0.05%. Almost no one on the planet is here yet. Imagine a whole team that works around the clock. Not employees, not freelancers, AI agents. And not just for business. I'm talking buying stuff for your house, researching trips, managing your calendar, all of it. How? Well, remember at the beginning I said don't use just one AI tool for everything? That was kind of a bit of a lie because where the world is going, you actually talk to one AI agent and it creates the right subagents for the job. In this future that's today, you never touch another tool again. One AI, one guy. My guy's name's Kai. Who named him? He did. I know it sounds crazy. And Kai creates sub-agents that are specialists doing things that I ask Kai to do, like check out the code and do marketing and do sales calls and everything. It's wild. Think of like an org chart where you have like the CEO and then their vice presidents and their directors and all that stuff. You can have a whole organization All AIs, all managed by one main AI who's at the top. You talk to them, you set the direction, you ask them to execute, approving what needs your approval. That's it. I'm talking about AI agents that have emails, that have the ability to call people, have the ability to review all information, have perfect recall, perfect context across your business. They check the work amongst themselves to make sure it's accurate. They check with the finance person and say, hey, do we have the budget for this? It is wild what's happening today. At this level, your job becomes deciding what to do. The AI agent decides how to do it. Nobody's talking about this. If you try to explain this to somebody else, they will think you're crazy. I'm speaking from experience talking to my brothers and trying to explain to my wife and my team members. Trust me, this isn't like the future that might exist. I'm doing this Today, my friends are using this system, level 3, today. They're going like this, zoom, like a rocket ship. They're realizing they can do 10 times more with 10 times less people. So let's go back to just touchpoints. How many times you have to interact with the AI to make it do things? In level 1, it's many because you're using a lot of different tools for every task. Level 2 is only a few because you start using point-specific solutions to get the thing completed. Level 3, it's just one. There's one AI agent that you build a relationship with and you talk to them and then it does it all. Let's talk about what the AI does in each level. In level 1, it helps you do the work. That's cool. It can write emails, it can do research, it could check on things for you. Awesome sauce. Level 2 is that it actually does the complete work product for you. Outcome driven, not just task. Level 3, it manages everything. It does level 1, 2, plus 3 and 4 and 5 that you didn't even know. Now we got to talk about what you do, what's your role in all this. And level 1, the truth is you're doing everything. Okay, you're faster. Cool. But it's still you. Level 2, now you manage the tool, the AI that's doing things for you. You assign it, you check it, you repeat. Level 3 is you just set the direction. You decide the what you want out of your life, and then it goes and looks at all your resources and your structure and everything you got, and it says, here's how we're going to do it. Now, I know that sounds like a lot of talk. So let me show you how I'm actually using this today, right now. So you might have heard of a product called Open Claw. The problem with it is that it's very complex. You predominantly need hardware that most people can't even buy right now to make it run. And there's massive security issues. What I did was take that platform and build my own. At Martell Ventures, we build AI-powered companies. So we decided to build Apex. Apex stands for Agent Platform for Execution. That's why it's called Apex. So I built Apex for myself 'cause I needed something that was secure, simple, and powerful. I wanted to give it to my team, but I was like, Open Claw, I can't let that go on my internal network. That's why I built it so that I could manage my own agents, the skills, the workflows, and honestly try to figure out how does this whole thing connect? Let me show you what it's doing for me right now. So first off, I've got Reese. Reese isn't real. It's an AI agent that Kai created to increase my real estate portfolio. And what he does every single day, 24/7, whether he's happy, sad, or whatever day of the week, he's scanning for real estate deals. He's emailing off-market deals. He's messaging brokers. He's building relationships. And I know you're like, how does a person not know? Trust me, Reese has perfect real estate expertise. The first 2 hours I let him go out onto the internet, he found 7 deals, analyzed them, said, here are the 2 we should make a bid on. Here's what I think we should go in at. Kai says, hey, do you want to make an approval on these 2 deals, I say, cool, tell Reese, let's make some offers. And this is all in the last week. All I gave Kai was direction and approval. Another use case is a unified inbox. Think of it this way. You have all these messaging tools, emails, WhatsApp, Slack, your socials. They all go into one place. And what I had Kai do is create a brain, what's called an agent file for each one of those inboxes off of the existing inbox and how I've already messaged on each one of those platforms. It knows how I write when I email people. It knows how I write when I'm on Slack. It knows how I text on WhatsApp. And then build a messaging protocol to surface things that need to see my attention or write drafts or email all by itself. It can look at context in my calendar. It can understand resources. It can know where projects are at. And the whole thing is managed by Kai with each individual agent on each unified inbox. And the crazy part is that nobody knows when I'm on vacation anymore because all the messages are getting responded to. Think about the mental and emotional load that no longer is there. How would you feel if you never saw those red notification jewels with 1,200 unread messages and all these different platforms? I also have a buying tool. This is a tool I created called Procure. You tell it to buy something and it does. Like, hey, I want to buy the new Meta glasses. It researches it, it finds it, it buys it, it ships it to me. It uses a virtual credit card that's limited and monitored. It gets all my login information from my password management tool. No more writing things down to buy it later. No more browsing on Amazon. No more grocery shopping and running errands and picking stuff up. Guess what? You don't have to do that anymore. It's execution at the speed of talk. Which brings me to my next tool, which is called Speak. It's a phone call tool. I built this to sit on top of Kai because I was like, I just want to call him. And guess what? He can only answer my phone calls. He only takes direction from me. So for example, I can give Kai a call. Hey Kai, can you tell me what messages I gotta pay attention to today? You've got 50 messages in dispatch, 41 unread. Top priority: Anne Henricks needs your final headcount for the Revelstoke retreat by Monday, plus 2 critical and 7 high priority messages. Cool, can you just text Anne and let her know that we're gonna be meeting at 11 anyways and I'll just review those then? Here's what I'm sending to Anne Henricks at 6:00. No, don't say my number. He just sends it. It's like having a full-time genius chief of staff slash buddy person that can write code and do research all on the other side of a phone call. And here's the deal. I'm not building Apex just for me and my team. I'm building it for everyone. I genuinely believe that the future of buying back your time is being the agent operator. That's what Apex is going to be, the platform for managing these agents for you and make it dead simple. Now, it's not ready yet because there's still a lot of testing, but if you want to be the first to know, just click the link below in the description and sign up for the waitlist. And that's the future. It's not 5 years away, it's right now. The question is, which side do you want to be on? This is bigger than the internet. This is bigger than Bitcoin. This is bigger than mobile. This is bigger than any technical shift in history. Don't be that person selling newspapers in the era of the internet. The one who saw it all, who was at Bitcoin in 2009 and did nothing. Because that time is today. It's not hypothetical. It's not a maybe. It's here and it's now. And it's not even that hard if you're willing to learn and more importantly, unlearn the thought of I can't do that. I'm not technical. That's not for me. Unlearn that. So I need you right now to leave me a comment below. And if it's level 1, that's fine. You're still more advanced than most of the people. Just let me know what level you're at below. And remember, if you want to turn your whole team, including yourself, into AI power users, just DM me the word YouTube AI on Instagram and I'll send it to you. And if you want me to walk you through how to use tools like Manus step by step, click here and I'll see you on the other side.