Jason M. Lemkin delivers a short, direct message urging professionals to stop passively "learning AI" and instead hands-on deploy simple agentic products (AI agents). He uses anecdotes about a CRO and a CMO to show that deploying, training, QA'ing, and testing an agent oneself is a differentiator for job readiness and career opportunities.
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. Tying all this like, no, you need to do AI. Don't do it, don't learn it. The way you're gonna 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 ends 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 encourage them to learn recipes online. I'm like, you will never learn to go to motion in today's world. 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. And then I wanna hear, for example, 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 mean I got nothing for you. I was really direct. I'm like, can I be honest with you? So, yeah, I always trust you, Jason. I got nothing for you. I gave you five 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, come back to me, I'll get you two jobs. I got nothing. I got nothing for her.
