Top 10 Ways AI Delivers Real Value

AI is a complete buzzword. Everybody’s talking about it. The biggest companies in the world are at the center of an arms race to figure out what the future looks like and which platform will deliver the value — and the changes are coming at an insane speed. The world is changing in a shockingly quick way.

As an entrepreneur or a leader of any sort, if you’re not embracing this fullheartedly, you’re going to get left behind.

That’s coming from someone who is not a technologist. I haven’t used a laptop in twenty years. This isn’t natural for me — but it’s something I’ve known I needed to embrace, and over the last year I have embraced it. I want to talk about the use cases and areas where it has fundamentally changed our business, and the businesses we invest in. It gives me tremendous optimism about the future, and about the explosion of productivity I believe is on the horizon. I’m sharing this because I’m living it and experiencing it.

Soft Skills vs. Hard Skills: The Balance Is Shifting

I have always been a soft skills guy. That’s been my strength — leadership, people, strategy. I grew up with a hard work ethic, played sports growing up, and there were things I was able to succeed at because I had really good soft skills.

There’s always a debate about what’s more important: hard skills or soft skills. Obviously you need both. But soft skills have historically won out. People with great people skills have been able to surround themselves with people who have different, complementary hard skills, and build great organizations. Henry Ford is a great example — he didn’t have many of the typical business skills, but he hired great people around him, and they built a great company.

What’s changing — and what I’m seeing in my day-to-day life — is that hard skills are becoming completely commoditized.

I dropped out of college. I never did technical design work, coding, or engineering. I never went to law school. I never had formal finance training. I’m really good at studying a P&L and going through a model, but I couldn’t build a model myself — I missed those lessons in life. Over the last six to twelve months, the skills that were elusive to me, the ones I had to bring in talented people to fill, are things I can now do at a very, very high level. Maybe even higher than the people I would have surrounded myself with, because the tools are specialized to the actual activity I’m doing.

Here are a few real-time use cases.

Presentations and Teaching

I’ve taught at BYU for the last six years — this will be year seven, alongside Travis Kimble and Corbin Church, and I’m excited to do it one more year. Part of that has always been building a presentation for my class and updating it every year, and the design was never great. It would get dated, and it wasn’t something I was going to sit down and do myself — I’d have to find somebody on the team.

The back-and-forth of communicating my vision, the changes I wanted made, either in person or over email, meant a lot of breakdown in communication. Today, there’s no third person. I can take that deck, put it into whichever platform I’m using — Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT — and iterate a hundred times on the presentation. I can get the most elegant design, the best framing of ideas, and independent expert feedback that helps me position my message in the most impactful, deliberate, and strong way. The time it cuts down is mind boggling.

Building a Family Office

Over the last three years we built out our family office. Family offices and permanent capital vehicles are one of the strongest emerging trends in finance right now. There’s an insane gap between the most sophisticated family offices — the ones that look more like a private equity firm than a family office — and the emerging ones that are still pretty dated.

As we built this out, AI became the catalyst for our research: figuring out what the best family offices in the world do, how they act, how they position strategy and vision, how they think through asset allocation.

Last night our team came over to the house, like we do every month. We sat down with my wife and went through all of our assets, our credit lines, insurance, and trusts. I’m able to take that information, put it into AI, and get incredible feedback on where we’re strong, where there’s risk, where we’re deficient, and how to reposition going forward. It’s a third-party expert available twenty-four hours a day, delivering the most thoughtful, direct, innovative advice on the most sensitive topics — intimate decisions and budgets that many people can’t easily talk through with others. Running sensitivity analysis, running forecasts, understanding the tax consequences of a decision before making it — there’s access that’s never existed before.

Accounting

Accounting is a skill set I never took a formal class in. When I went back to Harvard, I took their general accounting and finance course — enough to get a base-level ability to participate in the graduate program, but it was never going to make me an accountant.

Now it’s something I can do really, really well. When work comes back to me, I know which questions to ask, even if I can’t do the physical work myself. It lets me analyze the work that’s been done, pick holes in it rapidly, and come up with the right questions — at a level as high as anybody on our team.

Banking Relationships

Going forward, whether it’s with a portfolio company we work with or our own business, understanding what the best firms in the world do, and where they get their resources, is something we’ve never had this kind of access to before.

Traditionally, you’d reach out to someone you know in the industry for advice on who to use — a search for a needle in a haystack, and a pretty inefficient one. Now you can get access to the strategies the best firms in the world are implementing, and feedback on how you’d be advised to reposition if you were working with those firms directly. This has completely repositioned our company’s balance sheet, our access to capital — both for our own family office and for the companies we work with. We’re a better partner, by a factor of ten, because of the expertise AI brings.

Communication

I’ve tried to be a great communicator — clear, direct, persuasive. But communicating in writing has always been tough for me. I have ADHD, and sitting down to write a well-thought-out, elegant email has always been insanely tough.

Communication through our organization and to our partners is important, and on a high-consequence deal it becomes even more important. What used to be a liability, a weakness, or something I just avoided, is now a strength. The punctuation is right, the spacing is right, the message is right, and I can iterate as many times as it takes to make sure the message carries the exact feeling, emotion, and outcome I’m looking for — with language I never would have come up with myself, in a fraction of the time. It’s become a way to connect with people, deliver a message, and capture what we talked about, far more efficiently and consistently than before.

Advice

The reason I share this is to tap into the minds of the smartest, most talented, most successful people I can get access to, and try to distill their principles of success — the breadcrumbs — and apply them in my life.

Tony Robbins talks about a pattern: pattern recognition, pattern utilization, and pattern creation. First, identify what success looks like for you. Second, copy it and make it a habit. Third, over time, take your life experience and your team’s experience, take pieces of these different patterns, and create your own. But you can only do that once you have the habits, the knowledge, and the skills. AI lets me do that in fields I couldn’t do it in before.

The Productivity Explosion

This is speeding up our business. We’re more productive by multiples. We’re hiring fewer people, and fewer people are doing more work. I don’t see hiring less as a bad thing — those people will go somewhere else, or become entrepreneurs themselves. The difference in what the world looks like a year, two years, three years, five years from now is going to be exponentially different than it is today.

If you haven’t embraced this — and this is coming from someone who is not a technologist, someone for whom this wasn’t an easy transition — my invitation is simple. A year into being pretty religious about getting better and using AI daily, on more and more things, and making it front and center for our team, I’d challenge you: take the time, put in the effort, make this part of your life. Start with the tasks you delegate, or the ones you’re not doing at a very high level, and start experimenting with how to do them more efficiently, with higher quality, at a better level.

The Bigger Picture

I was on the phone with an investment banker this morning, and I told him 2026 is the greatest year on the planet — that there has never been a better time to be alive in the history of the world. His reply surprised me. He disagreed. He said he’d been reading the letters Rockefeller wrote to his kids, and that there were times in history that were more pure, more principle-based — that the drive and the ambition today isn’t what it was in different eras.

I listened for close to a minute, then told him I couldn’t disagree more. We’re on the edge of a technological revolution that is changing more rapidly than ever before — in health and longevity, in the ability to learn and relearn and understand any topic in the world at any time, at the highest level. That opportunity has never existed before. It exists today.

Go tear it up.