My $20 AI Advantage

I have a new friend, his name is Claude.

We talk every day. I pepper him with questions. He dutifully answers and often tells me to consider other points of views… then gives me the arguments I might be overlooking in dismantling those points of view.

I like Claude.

And his counsel costs me just 20 bucks a month.

Claude, as maybe you know or suspect, is an AI engine, the one from Anthropic, the tech firm that riled Pete Hegseth’s Department of Playing War, which honestly is a very good reason for me to pay for Claude.

Of course, that is not the reason I subscribe; just a happy benefit. I subscribed to Claude because I have found great use for AI and the efficiency it brings to my work life.

To be clear, I don’t trust AI to write for me. It’s not very good at mimicking my tone, my snark, my witticisms. And it clearly doesn’t have my memory bank to draw upon for the personal anecdotes I regularly share.

So it is, then, that these words you’re reading are really El Jefe, pounding away on a keyboard in his home office in Braga, Portugal, late on a warm Monday afternoon in late April.

But just before I started writing this, I spent the last couple of hours building a TikTok video on an epic French gold heist, and I used Claude a lot in building that video. He (I can’t call him an “it” for some reason) helped me structure and tighten the script I’d written. He helped double- and triple-check facts I wanted to ensure were, well, factual.

He gave me thoughts on what type of soundtrack to choose, based on the music and sound effects website I use.

He helped me write the description for the video as I was posting it, and Claude helped me find and incorporate the highest-ranking search terms relative to the video’s content, as well as letting me know the best hashtags to use to, hopefully, drive engagement. (This is the video, if you want to see it. Be warned, though; I might have used a George Carlin word in the intro.)

Thing is, I could have done everything Claude did for me.

But Claude executed each request in a matter of seconds, when those same tasks would have taken me minutes or, combined, a couple of hous, easily.

Thus, AI has made me noticeably more efficient and productive.

And that’s where I think most people are missing the bigger story.

For the last couple of years, we’ve all been fixated on the “gee-whiz!” factor of AI—ChatGPT writing essays, image generators cranking out artwork, generated videos which are becoming almost indistinguishable from real video… all the stuff that makes for good headlines and even better cocktail chatter.

But that’s not what’s changing my world.

AI isn’t replacing me. It’s not writing this column while I sip vinho verde and pretend I’m working. It’s far less dramatic than that.

What it’s doing is making me better at what I already do. It helps me organize my thinking, tighten ideas that are a bit loose, and move more quickly through the parts of the job that used to eat up time without adding much value. On its own, none of that is revolutionary.

But it adds up.

Stack enough of those small efficiencies together—and then multiply that across millions of people and thousands of companies—and you start to see where this goes.

That’s the shift.

In many ways, this is a redux of the internet, circa 2000. I quasi-joke regularly in my various presentations that the internet did not grow into the life-altering tech that it is today because all of us were pining for a better way to share cat videos.

It exploded into our lives because businesses saw a way to become more efficient, and to create new products and services that were not possible previously.

That’s AI today, just on an East German female bodybuilder’s dose of illegal steroids.

The first phase of AI was all about the technology itself. This next phase that we’re in right now is more subtle. It’s about how the tools are used, how they slip into the background of your workday and your everyday life to make things run that little bit smoother, that little bit faster.

It’s a cartoon Jane Jetson telling Rosie the robotic maid to clean the breakfast dishes and put them away while Jane goes about more important things in her cartoon life.

I see it already in my interactions with Claude. Things that used to take an hour now take a few minutes, sometimes just a few seconds.

When you’re a business and your competitor figures that out first, you don’t really have a choice. You keep up… or you die..

That’s exactly how this is going to play out.

Which is why I’m paying less attention to the shiny new toys… and more to how AI is actually being used in the trenches, and what AI needs to survive and grow from here, And just so you know, it’s not necessarily more and faster computer tech.

Because that’s where the real opportunity tends to be.