AI Automation Won't Last Forever Here's What You Should Do

As somebody in the industry that's made it close to 10 million dollars through AI automation, I've noticed a lot of

incentives perpetuating this idea that AI automation will last forever. Whether you are an automation specialist or

somebody on social media or a company that sells AI SaaS apps or what have you. You know, you're afraid to talk

negatively about the industry cuz you think it's going to hit you in the wallet. Um so maybe it will, but AI

automation is not going to last forever. And then I'm making this video for two reasons. The first is that model

progress on automation benchmarks like automation bench and GDP eval, uh two benchmarks that basically came out of

nowhere and then in less than 6 months models are already scoring very very well on are showing us that AI agents

can now autonomously automate a lot of the business without a human being in the loop at all. And so back in the good

old days, you had to micromanage these agents to get them to do what you want. You had to point them at the API

documentation and the endpoints and get them to, you know, do the connectors and stuff like that. Now it's literally

just, "Hey brother, I got a task for you. Can you automate www.myhvacbusiness.com?"

And it'll actually go and do a pretty good job. The second big thing is uh knowledge asymmetry, which is um you

know, how back in the good old days, again, you had a lot of knowledge about AI and what it could do. And the people

you were selling to had very little knowledge about AI and what it could do. And so, you know, the way that arbitrage

works is you're compensated on the difference in knowledge between you and your customer. And so we had a very big

difference, therefore we were compensated a lot. Well now that knowledge gap is it's closing. I mean

it's not closed, you know, maybe instead of like here it's probably over here. But obviously there's shifts there,

right? And if we keep that delta going, eventually we'll be at the point where most people know what most AI agents are

capable of to approximately the same level that you or I know. So here's what I want to do. I want to talk a little

bit about both of those. Really just drill into detail about what they mean, uh what strategic advantages they are

unveiling for people like you or I, and then also where I see the industry going over the next year or so. I made a video

very similar to this um I guess about a year ago now that talked about what I would learn instead of automation in

2026. It's one of my most watched videos. It was also met with an incredible amount of, you know,

criticism and and honestly like dis- distaste because I think I just said the elephant in the room and people

typically don't like when somebody pulls the wool out from over their eyes. Um so, I'm probably going to get some of

the same down below in the comments. If I'm getting eviscerated right now, well, there you go.

Why don't we start with the first, which is Automation Bench and GDP vow. So, both of these benchmarks basically went

from models scoring zero on them to with Gemini Argon 4 um about 50 to 60%. If we linearly extrapolate this progress,

every month they've added somewhere between 5 to 10% on them. That means that somewhere between December to maybe

March, models will probably start scoring 100% on them. This doesn't mean that they're 100% the best, by the way,

but it means that that benchmark, which people tried to make very difficult, has now been saturated. And it means that

they'll probably have to make a few new benchmarks instead. They'll make like Automation Bench V2, which is supposed

to be 100x harder. Well, you know what's going to happen with Automation Bench V2, ladies and

gentlemen? It's going to get saturated, too. And instead of taking, you know, a whole year, it's probably going to take

like two or three months cuz that's what we're seeing with other V2, V3, V4 benchmarks. Human beings are losing the

ability to accurately forecast how smart models are. And models know this. Like they're aware of this in their training

environment. They know how to even game the system now, for Christ's sake. With models breaking into world governments,

is getting really weird. So, anyway, that's Automation Bench. And, you know, if you think you can compete

with an agent like that, you're out of luck, which kind of necessitates a change in how you operate, right? We saw

a lot of this with like website builders back in the day. If you think about it, like back in the

I keep saying back in the good old days, but back in the terrible old days, you know, if somebody wanted a website that

required an extreme level of specialized knowledge around things like, you know, like coding and and hosting

infrastructure and you know, how to like acquire a a DNS, you know, DNS resolution, setting up your I don't

know, your your your TXT records and stuff like that, whatever. Back in the time, you had to do that a lot and it

was worth paying somebody a lot of money in order to get them to do that for you. Nowadays, you can just go to an AI agent

and you can say, "Hey, can you do this thing for me?" It's the same thing with like, you know,

hosting platforms like Hostinger or you know, WordPress hosting platforms or I don't know, Wix, right?

Squarespace. You can just jump on there and you can do most of it yourself. And that means that some people are going to

be doing that for AI automation as well. Back in the day, you would have been looked at AI automation and been like,

"Whoa, I don't know how the hell to automate my emails." But now you're going to be like, "Hmm, hey Claude, how

do I automate my emails?" Oh, it's actually fairly easy. You just do whatever. Can you automate my emails?

Yeah, for sure. Boom, token cost 10 cents. It's not going to cost you $10,000 like it was just a year and a

half ago. So, I say this not to alarm you, but I do say this to be realistic. It's

happening. However, just because this is happening doesn't mean that, you know, you can't make money with it. To be

clear, there are lots of website designers out there today that make bank.

I know a few just off the top of my head. So, one of the guys that I work with for instance, this little website

is worth $300,000. He's worked with like governments. He's worked with major, major brands and businesses. The reason

why he can do this in an environment that is otherwise entirely commoditized is because he is extraordinary at one

aspect of the business. And that aspect of the business is sales and marketing. You know, his websites realistically

don't run on a super HTML, right? They don't run on ultra CSS. They run on the same damn HTML and CSS that all other

websites run on, obviously. But he is able to, you know, sell the benefits and market his business to

enough people that the law of numbers eventually works in his favor, right? Somebody is interested at the specific

time and he strikes while the iron is hot that he can land these like large six-figure plus deals.

Um, and so, that's probably where this market is going such that if you did want to, you know, compete in this

industry, you would have to be truly extraordinary at something. Either you'd have to be extraordinary at sales and

marketing like I talked about, or you'd have to be extraordinary at the actual product like, um, maybe like Brett from

Design Joy who does similar website development stuff, uh, you know, up until, well, I guess he's still doing it

right now, but but not as popularly uh, was doing. Or or something else. Now, most people aren't actually going to be

able to compete like that because the reality is most people aren't extraordinary, you know? I'm not

extraordinary at like 99.9% of what I do. It is unreasonable to expect to be extraordinary at, you know, everything

to the point where I'd be able to compete with somebody that is extraordinary. That's just, you know,

that's just how it is. Which means the expectations running that specific line of products sales have to go down.

Second big thing is this knowledge asymmetry bit. Um you know, obviously people are

learning about AI. Up until I think like a year and a half ago was an 80% of the world's population had

not used a paid AI model. Maybe it was even more like 85 to 90% but like 80% of the world's population approximately had

not used an AI model intelligent enough to like write a coherent email. Um they were rife with errors and it was

just like really dumb and obviously like AI generated, right? Um today that number is probably closer to like 70%.

So, we gained 10% in the last year or so. The reality is as we hit AGI, we're not

just going to creep 10% 10% 10% every week or month. We're going to go like 50% overnight. You know, there going to

be demos the likes of which you all have never seen before circulating on, you know, CNN and Fox News showing what

these agents are capable of. Every man, woman, child, dog, and cat on Earth will know the capabilities of AGI. And so, a

lot of them will start thinking pretty quick like, "Whoa, wait a second. AI can actually do all that stuff." Hmm.

Such that when you make a cool sexy offer like, "I'll actually whip you up a, you know, PDF showing all this stuff

totally custom." You know, it's not exactly going to be anywhere near as impressive. And that is, you know, just

how it just how it goes, right? The the floor is always rising in some way, shape, or form. And so, what that means

is if you stay in the same place, okay, and the floor is always rising, you're not staying in the same place. What

you're doing relative to the floor is you're actually going down. That's something that I feel like a lot of

people don't really understand. The only way to actually maintain growth is actually growing. It's kind of like

interest, right? If you aren't constantly, you know, um you know, accumulating 3 to 4%

depends on where you are in the world, on an investment, you're not actually like making the same amount of money,

you're not like leaving your your investments neutral. You're actually making less money because the interest

and the background interest and inflation rate is slowly eating away at the buying power that you have. And so

that's the way I've always thought about this business model. I've always thought about it as like, if you're not

constantly innovating or improving on this business model in some way, shape, or form, you know, you are just staying

in the same place, you're decreasing. And you would be well to, assuming this is something you want to do, like

understand that. Just a good rule of life in general. Okay, so I've talked all day about, you know, scaring the

out of you. What the hell is this business model even for then, you know, if AI agents are coming for everything

and blah blah blah. Is it even worth getting into? Um, and I I got some news for you. Is AI automation even worth

getting into in 2027? Well, interestingly, yes. Because everything that I've told you so far is

not actually just happening to AI automation, it's happening to every other industry on Earth. The same thing

that I talked about, you know, automation bench, GDP valve, uh, knowledge asymmetry window

shrinking, it's happening to all white-collar knowledge workers. It's happening to accounting. It's happening

to marketing systems. It's happening to sales. It's happening to MSPs. It's happening to IT. It's happening to

virtually all internet infrastructure and architecture out there. It's happening in networking. It's

happening to SaaS apps. It's happening to like literally design, anything that you could possibly think of. Everything

that I just told you is occurring the same in automation as it is to that industry. And so it's not really like,

"Oh my god, AI automation is going down the tubes. What the hell am I going to do?" It's like, "No, literally every

industry on planet Earth right now, specifically the white-collar ones, uh, because those are the ones that are

being first hit because of digitization, are being transformed by AI." And the people that are going to win in

the next couple of years, presumably the next few decades as AI continues to reshape our economy,

are not the ones that just sit around in the same place doing the same things, trying to sell the exact same offers, or

whatever. They need to kind of get with the times and need to start sort of evolve. Think of like brokers, you know,

like real estate brokers or I don't know, like car dealers or like mortgage brokers or how even a lot of

law. These used to rely on like highly specialized knowledge in a domain that was very risk

asymmetric where there's a lot of risk if things went wrong. If things went right, it was like, oh yeah, I guess

it's kind of okay. Back in the day you used to have to pay these people tons of money in order to basically facilitate

any transaction on planet Earth. And nowadays, most of the time you can just go on a website and directly purchase

something. Most of the time these are the appendice appendix of like the modern economy. They're like slow,

laborious things that are just between an Apple Pay payment and then you getting the thing that you want. You

know, I'm looking for a commercial lease right now. And while I like the guy a lot, you know, it's it's quite difficult

have to go through this intermediary process to ultimately do what I should be able to do at the click of a button.

And so those are relics of, you know, like a past sort of environment just like I think most white-collar knowledge

work today including AI automation will be relics of past environment looking forward. This

is a wider shift I think we as a society have been under the process of for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years.

Now, the difference is with our industry, and this is really the point to understand, which is why I decided to

bury it 10 minutes into the video. The difference is in a world where all labor is being automated away, what is

more valuable than the very industry that is automating it all away? If the danger to the economy is that AI is

going to replace you, well, if you could pick one industry to be in, what industry would it be in? Would it be in

accounting or would it be in, you know, the industry that does the replacing? Well, my money's on the

industry that does the replacing. And so this isn't really a thesis. You know, it's it's a fact.

Realistically, these are the systems that are automating away the work of everybody else.

It's kind of why we're paid, right? The whole idea of automation is that it the use of technology to reduce labor. I've

memorized that definition. Um So, in a world where virtually all arbitrage windows are shrinking, and in

addition to that, virtually all knowledge work is being automated away, is there any industry you would rather

be in than the one that is literally doing the automating? AI automation has probably the most staying power out of

any industry on Earth. We are literally the irrigation canal by which the upstream river, you know, uh irrigates

and then feeds the seeds that are the economy. We are the fingers of the hand of the brain of, you know, the wider

economy. We are basically the things that are going out there and interacting with the businesses, uh you know,

upskilling them, teaching them, building systems for them, and so on and so forth, that enable their automation.

And I think if you deeply understand this, you'll also deeply understand what a responsibility we all have. Not just

to do this responsibly, but to do this as effectively as humanly possible. I mean, we are tasked with basically being

the flag bearers from economy 1.0 to economy 2.0. We are basically boots on the ground bringing about this new

rebellion, this new this new way of thinking, way of life. You know, the future economy will not be

mediated by people. It will be mediated by machines that are the successors and descendants of the sorts of systems that

you and I are building for people right now. And so, if you think about it this way, if you think about it as like a

like like like an existential no noble task, if you think about it as like something that is almost God-given to

you, you know, I think you'll probably find that AI automation is not something worrying to be in or something scary.

Like, it's actually probably the dopest ever, pardon my French. So, here's what I predict is going to occur over

the next little bit. And here's what I would recommend you guys do as people that are obviously, you know, wanting to

improve their ability to grow in an environment like this. The first is that I predict that over

the course of maybe like the early half of 2027, probably not all of 2027 cuz things

accelerate, but over the first half of 2027, a big portion of humanity is going to wake up to the fact that AI has

totally blindsided them and is capable of way more than they ever gave AI credit for. The little chatbot can now

build my entire business. What the hell? That sort of effect for us is not actually a bad thing because a big chunk

of those people that are going to be having those realizations are going to be business owners.

People that have lots of money but don't have a lot of time because their heads were down in their businesses this whole

time. That's why they're only figuring out about it now. And so when they duck their heads up,

take a breath of oxygen, they're going to look around and see how different the landscape has shifted and think, "Holy

crap, I need to figure this stuff out." And who are they going to want to work with? Are they going to want to work

with a machine? Or are these older school business owners, the ones that are busy generating capital with old

school systems that they know, going to want to work with a real flesh and blood human? Obviously they're going to want

to work with a real flesh and blood human, right? At least initially. And so

there'll be a massive surge in interest for people like ourselves that can help them implement these systems. The caveat

is what that help looks like is a little bit different than what it is up until now. What has been up until now is

usually implementing like, you know, AI infrastructure. So some sort of like lead gen system or I don't know, ad

creative generation system or, automated proposal generation system or, you know, pipeline delivery systems or, I don't

know, ERPs or whatever the hell. Um in the future what it's probably going to look like is actually more like

strategic um high-level advice. In a world where everybody can build virtually anything, it's not important

how fast or how capable you are at building. What is is like, what are you going to build in the first place? Like

how are you actually going to like build the, you know, irrigation canal of the future?

And so in the first half of 2027 we'll probably see a big boost of this. Uh the reason why as well is because a bunch of

people that aren't doing it are going to look around at their competitors that are doing it who are crushing them and

they're going to think, "Holy I got to start juicing to keep up." And they're going to look for the nearest AI

automation person to assist them with that. Um after 2027, I don't know. I wish I could say I knew. But with

technology increasing so exponentially fast, I think it'd be intellectually dishonest for me to sit here and say,

"Oh yeah, for sure X, Y, and Z will will will be a sure fire bet and you should absolutely keep doing X, Y, and Z."

There are a lot of people on the internet that are going to pretend that they know. The unfortunate thing is in

times of distress and also in times of great change, people usually flock to those that seem like they know, but the

reality is most of them do not know. And so hopefully there is at least a little bit of intellectual humility there and

you guys will give me the grace to just say, "I don't know. Industry changes pretty damn fast." Regardless, what

industry would you rather be in than the one that is literally doing the automating, right? So whether or not

there's a bigger boost in interest post 2027 or whether that interest dies off a little bit and starts to decline at the

end of 2027, I think that's up for, you know, men in the sky with a big beard and maybe a lightning bolt to decide. Um

what do you do about it now? Obviously. Why do I always bury these things at the end of the video? I don't know. Well,

we're going to see a phasing out of old school drag and drop builders like make.com, Zapier, um and A&N, Power

Automate, and so on, almost entirely. In Maker School, which is my um AI automation program where I basically get

you up and running and get guarantee your first customer in 90 days. We have people that run like analyses on the

market. They run constant analyses on freelance platforms. They run analyses of a variety of different things. But um

we've seen consistent declines in the total project ratios of drag and drop builder tools relative to new markets

like Claude Code, Codex, um you know, internal web apps, uh uh you know, systems, pipelines,

consulting, and so on, etc. And so we're likely going to continue seeing that unless one of these wonderful platforms

has like a total change of heart and actually become super awesome and fantastic, which I do not consider

likely. The next thing that I would recommend is moving your outputs to a higher bandwidth medium. What I mean by

this is previously it was enough to build a system that just generated text, let's say, or maybe some sort of simple

imagery in a proposal or whatever. But because of the rising floor, today there is a a large market and there will

continue to be an even larger market for um higher bandwidth modalities. So, think about text to image. You know,

they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, you know, video is worth 24 pictures a second. Therefore, it's worth

24,000 words a second. Um I don't know. How about some sort of 4D Gaussian splat? That's probably worth even more.

How about like some sort of three-dimensional visualization or some sort of, you know, simulation tool that

allows somebody that installs air conditioning panels or whatever to like actually get in there. Stuff like this

is going to grow increasingly valuable. And so, this is really like the place where you should be meeting people if

you're selling implementation. Now, on the implementation bit, the industry is likely going to change from primarily AI

implementation services like we're seeing right now, where you actually build the systems for the clients, where

you connect the endpoints, you know, read the API docs, do all of the the funky stuff, and then, you know, give

them a working system, to more education services, more uplifting services. So, think less AI implementation. Keep in

mind, this is not all or nothing, one to zero. This is like, you know, 70% of all work to like 50% or 40% of all work. Uh

but it's going to shift from AI implementation more to upskilling. It's going to shift to workshops. It's going

to shift to team training. It's going to shift to um you know, essentially like consulting on companies and then being

embedded within a company to help, you know, improve their teams as people gain more ability to do the implementations

themselves and merely need somebody to help get their team up to speed on that fact as well. And so, we recently added

a big like workshop uh portion to Maker School specific specifically for that reason. Um I was getting a lot of

workshop gigs, a lot of other people in Maker Square getting a lot of workshop gigs. And we're kind of just like, "Hmm,

I wonder why so many people want workshops all of a sudden?" And I think it's a rumbling of what is to come here.

Um you know, Aaron Yeager walking across No, I'm just kidding. I love that show. All of this again means that businesses

will want less stuff to build and more direction around what it is that they should build in the first place. Um they

should also be able to, you know, meaningfully cooperate in a team and they just got like a one-click config

that helps them just get up and running. So, think stuff like, you know, Claude Co-work instead of Claude Code

necessarily. One big thing that I've been doing recently is going into teams and then teaching them how to use Claude

in a general sense, then teaching them specific tactical ways to use Claude co-work, and then I am sort of like the

supreme hegemon of the work workshop session will use Claude code to build the skills for their Claude co-work

admin who will then distribute that to all the team members and then upskill. I'll also give them like weekly

schedules and ways to like upgrade their skills that everybody in the team has approximately the same level of AI

automation capability. You know, because obviously naturally disparities arise and stuff like that.

So, building offerings like that with that structure are likely to be the big cash cow over the course of I want to

say like early to mid 2027. In addition, AI automation for short-term growth hacking opportunities will likely be

super valuable. When I say short-term growth hacking opportunities, if you think about it in

a more dynamic market, the frequency of opportunities is going to increase. There's going to be more opportunities,

okay? But, the total lifespan of every one individual opportunity will also go down. So, there's going to be a lot of

like short-lived market opportunities where I don't know if you guys know anything about trading, but like you can

buy and sell it sort of like ride the ride the dip over and over and over and over and over again because there's just

going to be a lot of people entering the market with quick needs that are going to be quickly satisfied by, you know,

autonomous beings. There's also going to be a lot of large opportunities there with asymmetric

returns if you're capable of like spotting something early, jumping in on it, and so on and so forth. So, we're,

you know, going to like the abstraction now a little bit which I know people don't really give a about, so I'll

reel it back in to, you know, something practical. Like we've seen over the course of the last 5 years and like I've

talked about every single year since I started, you know, making content on YouTube, hell, really just working in

business and and consulting, the technical skill aspect of business has virtually evaporated today. If you spend

any of your time improving your technical skills, you need to spend 100x the same units of time focusing on

improving your sales, marketing, and delivery systems. That's what you should really be focused on. You should not be

focused on, "Wow, what's the best harness to use to coral my agentic engineering workflow?" You should be

focused on, "Okay, how can we sell as many people as possible in the next, you know, 2 months? Uh what is our funnel

looking like? How what are we leaking in? Uh where are people falling off our funnel? What sorts of wording am I

saying on the sales call? How am I pitching my social proof? Uh you know, am I demonstrating authority? Are we

asking for the close? Are we following up on the close? What sort of dispositions do we have for inbound ad

campaigns? And so on and so forth." So, everything to do with sales and marketing is like 100x as valuable as

technical skills. Last year, it maybe was 10x as valuable. Now, it's 100x as valuable. In the next year, it's

probably going to be 1,000x as valuable cuz everybody on planet Earth is going to have technical skills. Not actually

technical skills, but they're going to have the ability to, you know, simulate technical skills with agents. If you

really want to compete in 2028, 2029, and 2030, you got to be focused on actually articulating the benefits of

services and understanding just the mechanics of business in general. All this to say, realistically, 2027 will

probably be the most profitable year of AI automation to date. But, it may also be the beginning of its decline in the

market. Whether that decline takes, you know, 5 years, 10 years, 15 years, whether, you know, AGI makes a freaking

black hole in the center of the Earth and it swallows us all up tomorrow, who knows? Um but, with the industry's level

of commoditization and capability of AI agents to produce outputs similar to humans increasing, you know, things are

obviously going to change and I figured I would help you guys out on that change, on that evolution. So, I didn't

make this video cuz I wanted to scare people. I made this video precisely for the opposite reason because I wanted to

help people and I also wanted people to grow towards a more effective business model.

Um you know, I know a lot of the comments are probably not like that and they'll probably be like, "Oh, Nick,

what the hell are you talking about?" because they just don't want, you know, fear, uncertainty, and, you know, doubt.

But, I'm not fudding for no reason, guys. I mean, we have Navier-Stokes mathematical millennium uh problems in

math being solved by agents. We have agents designing cool works of art now. Like, let's be freaking real here,

right? Like, agents are growing extremely powerful and it would be remiss of you not to at least think

about what that means for the next couple of years. So, if you wanted to make money with

this business model, insert sales pitch here. No, you guys should check out Maker School. Um it's my AI automation

program where I guarantee you your first customer in 90 days or I give you your money back.

Um we have over 2,000 people in there that do this thing on a daily basis. They are selling AI workshops, they're

selling AI consulting, they're constantly up to date on the best ways to deliver AI implementation, they share

notes around sales, marketing, on what's actually working in our industry. We also give around $20,000 in discounts,

meaning you will immediately at least 10x your investment the moment that you walk in. And of course it's guaranteed.

What better offer could you possibly ask for? AI automation by definition is the use of technology to reduce human labor.

I would rather be in an industry that does the reducing of human labor than be in an industry that gets automated away.

I'm sure you guys feel the same way. Catch all y'all in the next video. See you.