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3 Skills I'd Learn In the Age of AI

2026-06-18 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 14:35 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Work and career (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: List of tips or lessons · tags: AI, His own numbers, Sponsor segment present

Ali names three skills to thrive in a post-AI world: getting good at using AI, getting as close to revenue generation as possible, and building a personal brand, by word of mouth and online; it all comes back to sales, which he expects to stay valuable when AI does the work.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Skill one: the skill of using AI

  • ★★ To get good at AI, Ali advises staying on the cutting edge: stop using the free version of ChatGPT and follow AI accounts on Twitter every day, because that is where the conversation about AI happens. — 00:00:00 · ChatGPT, Twitter
  • ★★ Ali advises using AI every day, understanding Claude Code, Codex and Perplexity, watching the annual conference talks of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, and working out how to apply AI to your business, life or work. — 00:00:00 · Claude, Google
  • ★★ Getting involved in AI now is like being early to the internet, Ali says: most businesses had no websites for a long time, and the ones that created websites won. — 00:00:38

00:01:08 — Skill two: get as close to revenue generation as possible

  • ★★★ Ali says any job has three prongs: making the money, doing the work, and operating or admin; for most people their job is in doing the work or in admin. — 00:01:08
  • ★★★ Ali predicts that in a post-AI world doing the work, and increasingly administering it, will become AI's job, while people will always be needed to win the work and make the money. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Partners at accounting, management consulting and law firms are paid a lot, Ali says, because they have the relationships and bring new clients into the firm, not because they make better PowerPoint slides than the associates. — 00:01:54
  • ★★ Ali has about 20 team members in his business: some are cost centres that cost it money and some are profit centres that make it money, and he asks which are likelier to stay in hard times. — 00:02:37
  • ★★ Ali's business is about to hire a director of client success; client success is generally a cost centre, Ali says, unless the department's leader turns it into a profit centre. — 00:02:37
  • ★★ Rather than answering customer support, a cost centre that AI easily automates, Ali advises orchestrating a system that keeps customers from cancelling their memberships, which touches revenue generation and makes you very valuable. — 00:03:06
  • ★★ Generating the revenue is much harder than doing the work, Ali says. — 00:03:06
  • ★★★ Ali's second skill for a post-AI world is to get as close to revenue generation as possible: the closer you are, the more likely you are to thrive, even if you think of sales and marketing as sleazy. — 00:03:36
  • ★★ Ali says that if you learn to use AI properly and use it to generate money for your business from the sales and marketing end, you are far more likely to thrive. — 00:03:36

00:04:06 — Sponsor read

00:05:25 — Skill three: personal branding

  • ★★★ Ali's third skill is personal branding, starting inside your own company: promotion comes not from how good you are but from how good your manager and your manager's manager think you are. — 00:05:33 · personal brand
  • ★★ Beyond your company, Ali suggests building a personal brand with LinkedIn posts on how you use AI to generate revenue for your company, a behind-the-scenes newsletter about your work, or a YouTube channel of advice. — 00:06:00 · personal brand, LinkedIn, YouTube
  • ★★★ Someone with a personal brand for competence in an area finds it much easier to thrive in a post-AI world, Ali says, because even if AI does the work, humans will decide where to spend money and where to point the AI. — 00:06:29 · personal brand
  • ★★ It is not hard to be a thought leader, Ali says: the old way was to get a credential, experience or credibility before teaching, but for ten years or more, doing the teaching is what makes people see you as legit. — 00:06:56
  • ★★ Ali says he has no qualifications to teach productivity and built his personal brand as "the productivity guy" just by making helpful videos of his productivity tips, which anyone could do. — 00:07:41 · personal brand

  • ★★★ Ali advises sharing content online about what you are doing, without giving away trade secrets: personal branding on the internet is just being a teacher to anyone anywhere. — 00:07:41 · personal brand

    “Personal branding, when you're doing it on the internet, is really just about being a teacher.”

  • ★★ Ali says he has in the past been offered 100 grand to give a talk about productivity. — 00:08:30

00:08:55 — Two ways to build a personal brand

  • ★★ The first of Ali's two ways to build a personal brand is word of mouth: being known among people as really good at a particular thing. — 00:08:59 · personal brand
  • ★★ Looking for an accountant, Ali asked entrepreneur friends in Hong Kong, who recommended Pierre at the firm Acclime; he had never heard of either, but on that trusted recommendation he met Pierre and is signing with the firm. — 00:08:59 · Hong Kong
  • ★★ Comparing tax in Singapore, Dubai, Malaysia and Hong Kong, Ali found Andrew Henderson's YouTube channel Nomad Capitalist on high-net-worth tax strategies, liked the videos and paid $25,000 to work with his team: an online personal brand. — 00:09:25 · Hong Kong, personal brand, YouTube
  • ★★★ Word of mouth and online are not either-or, Ali says: ideally your personal brand is a professional reputation favoured by people in your industry, and it adds fuel when it reaches beyond word of mouth. — 00:09:54 · personal brand
  • ★★ The aim is not fame like Brad Pitt's, Ali says, nor dancing on TikTok for strangers, but being niche famous to people in your industry. — 00:10:34 · TikTok
  • ★ A random person will not read your LinkedIn posts on raising lifetime value for enterprise customers with British Telecom, Ali says, but someone in your industry will, because it is what they care about. — 00:11:16 · LinkedIn

00:11:43 — Why it all comes back to sales

  • ★★★ Ali's whole thing is that basically everyone should be a sales guy: a business exists to serve customers and make money, and it pays you only because of a connection between your work and the money it makes. — 00:11:45
  • ★★ The more explicit you make the connection between your work and your employer's income, Ali says, the more leverage you have to negotiate raises, switch jobs or start your own business, because you know what you are worth. — 00:12:09
  • ★★ Sales feels like a dirty word to many, Ali says, but it keeps the economy alive, and salespeople are often the highest paid in a company, sometimes above the CEO, because they bring in the money. — 00:12:09
  • ★★★ Sales does not have to be cold calling customers, Ali says: it is the ability to express ideas, get buy-in from your team, keep everyone aligned, negotiate with your manager and manage up and down, a skill set that will stay valuable after AI. — 00:12:56
  • ★★ Even the skill of being a doctor is being democratised by AI, Ali says: with ambient listening devices, AI already diagnoses patients better than most doctors, and it is the worst it will ever be. — 00:13:25
  • ★★ In a world where AI is like a genius who can do anything, Ali says sales, convincing another human to part with their cash, is almost the only valuable thing left. (overstated) — 00:13:54

In the description and comments

  • ★★★ The three skills Ali thinks matter most in a post-AI world are getting good at using AI, getting as close to revenue generation as possible, and building a personal brand as the go-to person in your space. — video description · personal brand

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: personal brand · winning the work

Also: People: Andrew Henderson · Brad Pitt

Organizations: Acclime · Anthropic · BT · Google · LinkedIn · OpenAI · TikTok · Twitter · YouTube

Places: Dubai · Hong Kong · Malaysia · Singapore

Products: ChatGPT · Claude · Codex · Perplexity

Also centred on winning the work: My honest advice to someone who wants passive income

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