Article
The Gap Between Professionals in the AI Era
A few days ago I interviewed a senior marketer. An experienced man, years of practice. I asked him about AI.
He said he barely uses it. Now and then he asks it how to set up something technical. Nothing more. He does not use it to simplify routine tasks. He had one bad experience with the output and decided he was too senior for it to add value when it is not perfect.
That caught my attention. This exact attitude can be observed across different fields, for example among some experienced programmers too.
I know the other side as well. Professionals who automate everything that can be automated. When they have something to do, the first thing that comes to mind is a question: can this be done through AI? And if it can, they build a tool for it. And they never click it by hand again, nor write that code by hand again.
Two senior people do the same work today, in the same field. But their working days look completely different. In ten years in e-commerce I have not seen such a difference.
That senior does the same task today, does it in a week, and does it in a year. Every time from the start. The other one solves it once, builds automation around it, and then comes back to it only when it needs tuning or fixing.
Both work equally hard. The difference is whether the result of the work becomes a foundation that the next day a layer is built upon, or whether a person does the same work from scratch every day.
I belong to the second group. I do nothing twice. What I solve once, I return to only as a built foundation on which I build something further.
And I enjoy it — for some it is hard to imagine how much. It is the same feeling I had when I learnt to program in primary school. Back then it absorbed me. Now, with AI and automation, I feel a similar flow.
I meet people, at interviews for instance, who do not have this at all. That senior rejected AI because the output was not perfect. But that is not how it works.
When it comes to a complex problem tied to the context of a company, the first version of the automation handles it at eighty, ninety per cent. That is not a failure. That is the start. It improves step by step.
Join the Library
Full access to my thoughts, personal stories, findings, and what I learn from the people I meet.
Join the Library — €29.99 per yearSummary
Common questions on this article's topic
Why do some experienced professionals reject AI?
Does AI automation have to be perfect to be worth it?
Is using AI a question of skill or of character?
How much can AI automation save a firm?
Why does the gap between firms in AI adoption widen?
Does AI automation need maintenance?
Related articles
AI produces the graphic, the newsletter and the product page faster than a person. What is left for the one who used to do it is the judgement — knowing whether the output is good. But most people have worse judgement than AI. And whoever cannot judge quality cannot delegate either. How do you tell whether yours is the judgement a company relies on, or the kind it can replace?
Will AI take my job? A certified Google trainer told me in June 2024 that my profession would cease to exist. Twenty-two months later, my job title has not changed — but ninety percent of what I do during the day is different. I have delegated more of my thinking to AI agents than I thought possible. I am not afraid. This is why, and what it means for anyone asking the same question.
For a long time we treated the internet as the main road. The place where work and relationships happen. Yet most of what we see on it today is, or soon will be, AI-generated: text, images, profiles and comments. The internet is turning into an online game full of bots, where you cannot be sure that a human is on the other side of anything. So I ask: was the online world the main road, or only a temporary detour that part of us will return from, back offline?
More articles
Europe does not have the capacity to face a full-scale, mass drone war of the kind we see in Ukraine. Three dependencies weaken it: China supplies the physical material for defence systems, the United States supplies capabilities Europe does not have, and twenty-seven states cannot agree how fast, or who pays. Rearmament plans exist, but they are being carried out slowly.
In April, in the first part of this series, I wrote about an AI prediction system I had started building on my own machine. At the time the software was a few hours old and the prediction record was empty. The record since then has shown one thing — the system does not yet understand the market it is being asked to forecast. It can pull macro context, book value, earnings. But it cannot put those together into something that helps it understand the price.
Prague, 13 May 2026. On my way to work I started thinking about something that stayed with me for days. If most routine work on a computer disappears in the next ten years, and a large share of repetitive manual work disappears with it, what happens to the flow of money? Who pays whom for what? Which economic layers will exist, how large will they be, and what relationships will run between them? This is the six-layer map I sketched as an answer.
I am building an AI system to predict the S&P 500. It runs on my own machine, uses free public data — yfinance, FRED, the Shiller dataset — and grades every forecast against reality. This series documents the build itself: the decisions, the methodology, the mistakes. What I will eventually share from the running system is a separate question, and an honest one.
Yesterday I could not tear myself away from the computer. When I lifted my head, it was half past eight in the evening. I had been sitting alone upstairs for about three hours.
One hour. Fifty-five minutes. That is how long it took to build what a Czech software firm had quoted at over €50,000. I built it with Claude Code. Not a prototype. Not a proof of concept. A working tool — the one the company actually needed. By the evening of the same day, it was running on staging. This is not about Claude Code. It is about what Claude Code exposes.
I have conducted roughly one hundred and fifty practical interviews over the past four years. Fifty for data specialist roles. A hundred for advertising and performance marketing specialists. Almost every one of them involved sitting down with a candidate over a practical task — something close to a real problem we actually need to solve at the company. Not theory. Not trivia. Applied problem-solving. Over time, I started noticing a pattern.
Four days in Catalonia. No computer, no AI, almost no social media. I bought this notebook so that I could write down what I would think about, and what I would come across and learn on the trip.
