You Will Thrive in AI If You Already Know Something Well
There’s a lie floating around right now that you need to become a tech person to survive in the age of AI. That you need to learn to code, understand machine learning, or spend hours every day mastering new tools just to stay relevant.
That’s not what I’ve seen.
The people thriving with AI are the ones who already knew something deeply before AI came along. They have industry expertise, years of experience, and hard-won knowledge about how things actually work in their field. AI can help them go deeper into what they already know. It can help them move faster, produce more, and scale what used to take all their time.
But here’s the thing most people don’t talk about: AI makes mistakes. Sometimes it’s confidently wrong. And the only way to catch that is if you actually know the subject. If you’re starting from nothing, you’ll publish AI’s errors without even realizing it. Eventually, people notice.
Why Your Background Matters More Than You Think
I came to AI with over 30 years in business development and marketing. Not as a tech person. I knew how to build offers, how to position products, how to communicate value, and how to move people through a customer journey. When I started using AI, all of that knowledge became my filter.
AI would generate something, and I’d know immediately whether it would actually work or whether it was just words that sounded good. That knowing came from decades of doing the work. AI gave me speed, but my background is what made the output useful.
The same is true of my immersive (and sometimes obsessive) studying of the Bible, learning about spiritual warfare, and developing the ability to recognize deception. When I look at AI through that lens, I notice things other people miss. Where it can be used for good. Where it starts leading people astray. The ethical questions that most AI educators never even think to ask.
I brought something to the table that AI couldn’t give me. And so do you.
What This Looks Like Across Different Industries
A real estate agent knows things about their local market, about buyer psychology, about what actually makes deals close that no AI model was trained on. AI can help with listings and follow-up, but without that market knowledge, the output is generic at best and wrong at worst.
A health coach understands the emotional patterns their clients face. Why people self-sabotage. What actually creates lasting change. AI can help create content and build programs, but the understanding of human behavior is what makes the work land.
Ministry leaders carry theological depth and spiritual discernment that AI will never have. AI can assist with research and communication, but shepherding people and recognizing what’s actually from God? That’s not something you can outsource.
And if you’re in network marketing, you understand relationship dynamics and long-term business development in ways that take years to learn. AI can help with content and systems. Your relational intelligence is what builds teams that last.
The People Who Struggle
The people I see struggling with AI are the ones who came to it hoping it would give them expertise they don’t have. They want AI to make them sound like they know what they’re talking about. And for a while, it works. The content sounds polished. But there’s no depth underneath, and eventually that becomes obvious.
AI reflects back whatever you bring to it. If you bring real knowledge, it helps you go further. If you bring nothing, you get content that sounds like everyone else’s AI content.
Where This Leaves You
If you’ve spent years building expertise in your field, you’re not behind on AI. You’re actually in a stronger position than most people realize. The foundation is already there. What you need now is to learn how to use AI in a way that serves what you already know and sounds like you when it speaks.
That second part matters. Because if you let AI flatten your voice into generic content, you lose the very thing that made your expertise valuable.
I’ve been working on something to help with exactly this. It’s called AI Writing Guardrails: Write Like You, Not Like a Robot. It’s designed to help you write like yourself without sounding artificial, generic, or compromised. It includes my complete guardrails document with over 80 specific patterns to avoid and use, a voice sample template so you can train AI on how you actually communicate, example prompts that work with the system, and a video walkthrough showing exactly how I set this up.
It should be ready in the next few days. If you want to be first to know when it drops, make sure you’re subscribed.