You Are Not "In AI" (And That's Okay)

I was at a networking event in Denver recently, and I swear half the room introduced themselves by saying, "I'm in AI."

One was a legitimate machine learning engineer at a FAANG company. Another was building a RAG pipeline for a healthcare startup. But the third guy? He ran a marketing agency and had just discovered he could use Midjourney to make blog images.

We need to have a serious conversation about the difference between using a tool and building a capability.

Calling yourself "in AI" because you use ChatGPT is like saying you're "in the culinary arts" because you know how to operate a microwave.

The Three Tiers of AI Adoption

Let's clear the fog. There are three distinct levels of interaction with this technology, and confusing them is dangerous for your career and your business.

1. The Consumer (The Microwave User)

This is 90% of the "AI experts" on LinkedIn. They know how to prompt. They know which tools are cool this week. They get personal productivity gains, writing emails faster, summarizing PDFs, generating images. Value: Low leverage. Anyone can buy a microwave. If your competitive advantage is that you use the same tools as everyone else, you don't have a competitive advantage.

2. The Integrator (The Line Cook)

These people are actually wiring things together. They aren't just chatting with a bot; they are connecting APIs, setting up automations with Zapier or Make, and building workflows that pass data from one system to another. Value: Medium leverage. They are creating efficiency, but they are usually automating existing, broken processes. They are making the bad soup faster.

3. The Architect (The Executive Chef)

This is where the money is. The Architect doesn't care about the tool itself; they care about the system. They are asking: "Why are we writing this email at all?" "Why does this process exist?" They use AI as a forcing function to redesign the entire operation. They aren't just automating a task; they are eliminating the need for the task to exist. Value: Massive leverage. This is operationalization.

Stop "Doing AI" and Start "Solving Problems"

The problem with being "in AI" is that AI is a commodity. The models are getting cheaper and faster every day. The "secret knowledge" of how to prompt is evaporating as the models get smarter.

If you want to build a durable career or company, stop identifying with the hammer and start identifying with the house you're building.

I don't care that you know how to use the latest image generator. I care that you figured out how to cut our creative production costs by 80% while increasing output by 300%. I don't care that you have a custom GPT. I care that you reduced our customer support response time from 4 hours to 4 seconds.

The "Ingredients" Trap

In the culinary world, there's a saying: "If you have good ingredients, try not to screw them up."

AI provides infinite, high-quality ingredients. Intelligence is now cheap. Creativity is now abundant. The bottleneck has shifted from sourcing the ingredients to designing the menu and running the kitchen.

The people who win in the next decade won't be the ones who are "in AI." They will be the ones who are in Operations, in Strategy, or in Design, who happen to use AI to rewrite the rules of their industry.

Moving from Consumer to Architect

If these tiers look familiar, they should. They map to a maturity curve. Most organizations start at tier one (everyone chatting with a bot) and stall there because they never build the operational discipline to move higher.

The jump from Consumer to Integrator is a skills problem. The jump from Integrator to Architect is a thinking problem. It requires someone willing to question the entire process before automating any of it. That's the hard part, and it's where the real value lives.

So, the next time someone asks if you're "in AI," tell them the truth:

"No. I'm in the business of fixing broken companies. I just use AI to do the heavy lifting."