Stop learning AI. Invest in learning THIS skill instead

Five things happened to me over the space of two months that all circled back to artificial intelligence, and I couldn't stop thinking about what they meant for anyone marketing and selling their own offer. If you're AI curious, or you've been wondering whether your next investment should be another AI tool, I want to walk you through what I found, because I don't think anyone else is talking about it this way. Let's get one thing out of the way first. I use AI in my business. Descript edits our podcast. Canva's background remover is AI. Claude builds spreadsheets for me and audits my clients' webinars and sales pages. At this point in my business, opting out of AI entirely isn't realistic, and I'm not here to pretend otherwise. What I am here to do is question the story we're all being told about AI, and make the case for the one skill that will matter more than any tool, prompt or agent you download.

What sent me down this rabbit hole

Inside the Peace and Profit Mastermind, I'm constantly looking for ways to help clients get things done faster. So I paid for a handful of skills from people in the AI space who are genuinely excellent at what they do, people with highly successful businesses who spend far more time in this world than I do. I wanted to see what a fully built out AI skill could actually produce for a client's launch emails, lead magnets and sales assets. I read through the most detailed one I could find. The reference files were thorough. The person had clearly put real care into it. And still, two things disappointed me. First, the amount of input required from me before it would produce anything usable, we're talking one to two hours of briefing for a single output. Second, how average the result still was, even with a full brand bible and built out project behind it. I asked it to write one launch email and I was underwhelmed by what came back. Around the same time, my personal Instagram algorithm tipped over into AI content, the way these things do once you watch one too many. One clip stopped me cold: someone from an AI safety organisation talking about senior people inside the AI industry who don't expect their own children to reach high school. That sent me deep into research on AGI, singularity, and what the people building this technology actually believe is coming. Then I ran a Claude skill as a bit of a test on my own audience. The response was enormous. More DMs and comments than almost anything else I've posted. Which told me two things at once, that everyone wants the shortcut, and that I needed to think harder about what I was handing people. And the fifth thing, the one that actually changed my mind, was what I found when I went deep into a client's sales page.

The fear-mongering baked into the AI narrative

If you spend any time listening to former OpenAI or Anthropic employees, or even current AI CEOs, you'll notice a pattern. There's an openly shared belief among many of these executives that there's somewhere between a 10 and 25 percent chance AI leads to human extinction. Say that number out loud. Twenty five percent. And they're all racing to build AGI, artificial intelligence that matches human intelligence, or singularity, the point where it surpasses us and can improve itself faster than we can track. Here's the part worth sitting with. That fear is also the fundraising pitch. If the stakes are the end of the world, governments and investors need to back whoever gets there first, before a rival nation does, before someone in a garage does it for the wrong reasons. It's a story that serves the narrative and the balance sheet at the same time. I'm not saying the risk isn't real. I'm saying it's also convenient. The same pattern shows up in the "you'll get left behind" messaging aimed at business owners, and specifically at women. The idea that if you don't adopt AI now, you'll be irrelevant. That if you don't have 30 AI agents running your business, you're not doing enough. If your gut reaction to that kind of talk is "what the actual heck", trust it. There's also a Deloitte study worth knowing about. Trust in a brand dropped by more than 50 percent when an audience believed that brand was overly reliant on AI for its content and sales assets. We're living inside an attention and trust economy, in a market that's more mature and more crowded than it's ever been. Differentiation and radical trust are what get someone to choose you over the next person doing the same thing. Leaning too hard on AI works against exactly the thing you're trying to build.

What the radiologists taught us

A few years ago, the AI industry ran a similar prediction about radiology. Don't bother training as a radiologist, they said, the job will be gone. It didn't happen. There are more radiologists than ever, and the ones thriving are using AI to sharpen their expertise, not replace it. What we've actually seen in the job market is entry-level roles taking the hit while senior, expert-level positions stay in demand, because someone still needs to know what a good output looks like and what a bad one looks like. AI is pattern recognition. It predicts the most statistically likely next word, not the right one for your specific audience, your specific offer, your specific moment. The people who can tell the difference are the ones who trained that instinct before AI existed to do the guessing for them. Which raises the real question I can't shake. If we still need senior people to critique and direct AI output today, what happens in ten or twenty years when those senior people retire and nobody trained the next generation because AI was doing the junior work instead?

What actually took a sales page from 0.6% to 3.5%

Part of what I do inside the Mastermind is audit my clients' assets, sales pages, webinars, launch emails, on a fortnightly basis. One client's sales page went from converting at 0.6% to 3.5% after we worked through it together. That result came from understanding sales psychology at a level a pattern-matching tool simply doesn't have access to. Here's a tangible example. This client's audience feels overwhelmed in their day to day life. Feeling overwhelmed is one of the biggest things stopping them from saying yes to a new program, because nobody wants to add another thing to an already full plate. The standard advice for a hero section is a product mock-up, something tangible that says "this is real, this is what you get." We threw that out. We put her face there instead, because what she's actually selling is proximity, a real person who will look at what this client is doing and hand her a simple, specific plan. We also rewrote the big headline in that hero section to speak directly to the overwhelm. Every template tells you to lead with the offer promise instead. We didn't. None of that comes from a prompt. It comes from understanding a very specific audience at a very specific moment, and knowing which convention to break and why. If your expertise is sales pages, using AI to speed up execution is a smart move. If it isn't, and you ask AI to write your sales page from scratch, you're the blind leading the blind, because you have no way of knowing whether what came back is actually good.

The skill worth building instead

My call to action is simple. Opt out of the fear-mongering. You will not get left behind by sitting this one out, and you might actually save time by not sinking hours into briefing a tool that hands back something you have to rewrite anyway. If your expertise is something AI can genuinely amplify, leverage it. Use it to find patterns, summarise, prepare drafts you'll heavily edit. But if you don't know which wire to cut, and you hand AI the wire cutters anyway, you're not saving time, you're outsourcing a decision you're not equipped to make yet. The fix isn't a better prompt. It's building the underlying skill, reading, mentorship, real reps, until you're the person who knows exactly which wire to cut and why. That skill, persuasion, sales psychology, human connection, is going to matter more in two, four and ten years than any AI fluency ever will. It's also, not coincidentally, the exact thing we work on inside <a href="https://thebcollective.krtra.com/t/BybfdY9L2QoQ">Sold Out Signature</a>, because a sales page that converts isn't built from a template. It's built from understanding exactly who you're talking to and why they're hesitating. I know my thinking on this will keep evolving, and I'd genuinely love to hear where you land, whether you agree, disagree, or feel like you're right in the middle of figuring it out too. Come find me in the DMs.