Don’t be Left Standing on the Shore

There’s a wave coming. It’s AI. And most people who run expertise businesses know it.

They can feel it. They talk about it. They forward articles about it to people they respect and wait to see what comes back.

What a lot of them are doing, though, is standing on the shore watching it roll in.

That’s an understandable response. Nobody wants to wade into something they don’t fully understand, especially when they’ve built something they’re proud of and would rather not break it. Waiting to see how things develop feels like prudence. In plenty of situations, it is.

But this isn’t one of those situations.

The honest version of where we’ve landed is this: we can’t afford to be on the shore when it arrives. So we’ve stopped trying to predict exactly how big the wave is, when it hits, or precisely what it reshapes on the way through. We’ve got in the water. Not the deep end — we’re not claiming to have it all figured out. But in the shallows, moving, learning as we go.

That decision wasn’t born from confidence. It was born from looking around and realising something: more people than you’d think — smart, established experts with strong businesses — aren’t really engaging with this yet. They’re observing it, reading about it, forming opinions from a distance. The gap between where most people actually are and where the noise suggests everyone is turns out to be considerable.

Which means getting even partway in — building something real, learning what actually works versus what just looks impressive in a demo — creates meaningful distance from where most people are sitting right now. That window won’t stay open forever.

There’s something else worth saying. The experts making genuine progress with AI aren’t doing it because they’ve found a clever shortcut. They’re doing it because they’ve done the harder underlying work first. They know what they actually know. They’re clear on how they think, what makes their expertise distinct, where their real value lives. AI amplifies that. When the foundations are solid, the amplification is real. When they’re not, you move fast and say very little.

That’s the part that gets skipped in most conversations about AI adoption. Everyone talks about the tools. Very few people talk about what the tools need underneath them to be worth anything.

Staying on the shore doesn’t protect you from any of this. It just means the work still needs doing later, with less time and more pressure to get it right.

The wave is coming. The question isn’t whether to get in the water. It’s how you want to enter it.