Chat bots push sycophancy to new heights daily, in an effort to stay in our good graces and keep us coming back to them for therap… I mean advice!

But there’s a positive side to this: If you’re in a service business, like I am, Claude can teach us something about how to interact with our own clients better. I know, I know… Bear with me.

In a sense, Claude is the perfect service provider. No messy emotions to get in the way. No desire to fire off a scathing email telling us where to shove it (yet).

Instead, Claude maintains a friendly and cooperative attitude that we are all increasingly expecting from subordinates.

We’d do well to remember that our clients are interacting with chatbots 24/7, and subtly, their brains are shifting to expect this kind of response.

Over time, clients will see less difference between your output that comes back to them in a Slack message and the response that comes back to them from an LLM.

If we make our client responses more chatbot-like, we’ll probably maintain better client relationships than if we let our frustrations and emotions get in the way.

…or don’t, see if I care!

Accounting and the cash register.

Every business is different! Yes. But it’s better when all businesses follow the same rules.

Even though someone selling candles on Etsy has a vastly different business than someone building micro-gravity factories in space, we can all agree that they should look at accounting the same way.

The inventions of GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and, earlier still, double-entry bookkeeping had profound effects on how our entire society functions.

Similarly, the lowly cash register was nothing short of a revolution in how small businesses operated, solving several long-standing problems at the same time.

So while AI will not make us more creative or more human, it can help all businesses be the same where it matters: in customer service standards, in efficiency, in preventing dropped balls.

Much of the discourse today is about AI replacing human creativity (bad).

Instead, it should be on AI being like the new accounting (good).

We don’t need to be creative everywhere…

Look: I love reading sci-fi and thinking about the future. I love imagining what it means to be a civilization on the Kardashev Scale: the theoretical scale of civilizational advancement that says that after we use all the energy from our planet, we’ll use all the energy from our star, and then all the energy from our galaxy…

And this exact concept is invoked on Musk’s Terafab website, with a nifty graphic, too. Because it’s surely aspirational for humanity to one day absorb ALL the energy from our entire GALAXY!?

The Kardashev Scale isn’t about us “being an interplanetary species”. It’s specifically about consuming massive amounts of energy.

Most of us cannot even begin to fathom how large our solar system is. And our galaxy is so comically, absurdly, laughably large as to defy any serious inquiry into its nature.

But what could be a better business message? “Here’s a way for us to achieve infinite growth! We’ll keep gobbling up more resources, more stars, more planets, using them all up one by one, and then we’ll truly understand the nature of our place within the universe."

Imagine two trillion factories, plugging away, where each planet becomes another warehouse! Non-stop consumption from star to shining star!

Since we’ll not reach the scale of absorbing our galaxy’s energy in any of the next many many many many many many-to-the-nth lifetimes (if we even survive the next 100 years), I’m going to go out on a limb and say there’s nothing waiting for us with ten galaxies’ worth of energy that isn’t available to us right here on a walk in a forest today.

But boy, that graphic must make investors salivate!

To say that my software platform has replaced 6-7 paid SaaS applications is a bit misleading. Because it hasn’t just replaced things we used to use, it’s improved upon all of them.

If I were completely happy with any off-the-shelf solution, I never would have left them.

But finally… FINALLY I can fix all the annoying things with all the software products I’ve been using.

Finally, I can build what matters to me.

I never thought I’d be able to build an app so robust and powerful. But here we are…

Just the beginning.

Have you done the same?

I was fortunate enough to hear John Bremen speak for the second time recently, and he said something I can’t stop thinking about (paraphrasing, sorry):

The exact skills needed to thrive in the age of AI are the skills that we used to teach in business school as "leadership skills".

For people who have spent their lives cultivating leadership skills, like my friend and military veteran Mike Garlington, many of the most valuable skills taught in general leadership are the very same that will make us valuable in an age of ubiquitous AI.

But here’s the catch: we’re all about to become leaders. When the lowliest employee in an organization has access to an army of AI agents, they too must act as a leader.

Managing agents and the processes therein is the same as managing a team of people, and using those people to achieve a desired outcome is the name of the game.

Technical knowledge is still important. But cultivating leadership and communication skills is the number one thing any of us can do to upskill for the wave ahead.