50th Percentile AI Strategy

Shaan argues that you don't need to become an AI expert to win with AI. Instead, focus on getting to 50th percentile AI skills to multiply your existing expertise.

The 50th Percentile AI Strategy

• Wrong game: Trying to beat AI geniuses who are technically brilliant and working on it 24/7
• Right game: Get to 50th percentile in AI to multiply against your existing top 10% skills in business, content, or your domain
• If you're already top 10% in your field and reach just 50th percentile in AI, it multiplies your capabilities significantly
• Don't compare yourself to 22-year-olds with plastic brains or people who are technically brilliant
• Focus on getting "just good enough" or "just dangerous enough" with AI

The K-Shaped Economy of AI

• Jobs are bundles of tasks, not single activities
• 80% of tasks will be replaced by AI
• 20% of tasks will be enhanced by AI
• The winners will use AI to 10x or 100x their output
• The losers will say "this is too new, too fast, we should keep it old school"
• It's not that your whole job goes away - you need to identify which tasks AI can do or enhance

Practical AI workflows that multiply productivity

• Voice-to-text for content creation
  • Walk and talk for 30 minutes rambling ideas
  • Feed to ChatGPT to remove rambly parts and structure it
  • Get 85-90% finished content without looking at a screen
  • Works for emails, blog posts, book chapters
• AI for emotional intelligence
  • Upload angry emails and ask AI to rewrite productively
  • Get what you want while maintaining relationships
• AI content strategist workflows
  • Set up machines to constantly scan YouTube for what adjacent channels are doing
  • Identify outlier videos and analyze why they worked
  • Reference against your brand corpus
  • Generate pitches for what you should create
• AI for team management
  • Summarize dashboards and messages
  • Alert when anything important happens
  • Particularly useful for 10-30 person teams

The opportunity multiplier effect

• Musical chairs analogy: If you add 50 people but 50x the chairs, competition doesn't matter
• AI is like every product in every category just came up for grabs
• Plus a whole slew of new categories that didn't exist before
• The opportunity set is so much bigger that more competition is irrelevant
• You'd rather have a huge multiplier on possible ways to win than less competition

Real-world impact examples

• Billion dollar company doubled profit margin with three AI changes:
  • Improved customer support with AI
  • Made developers more productive
  • Replaced junior programmers who weren't good at using AI
• Created an "AI general manager" to manage projects
• This is happening at scale, not just for small companies

The forcing function approach

• Use deadlines or commitments to force yourself to play with AI tools
• Don't wait to feel ready - just start experimenting
• The best way to learn is "blind leading the blind" - figure it out together rather than having experts spout jargon
• Make it a regular practice to try new tools and see what you come up with