The 1-hour Opal foundations course

Transcript · Why here, why now

Why here? Why now? So knowledge work for the last decade has been pretty consistent. My background is in growth. I have done SEO and paid acquisition and paid media for the last twelve plus years. And my job was essentially, like, I launch some things. I create some reports. I do a few presentations of those reports. I do that again and again, and everyone loves what we do.

Then all of a sudden, our new friend comes to town, and nothing's kinda been the same since. So AI quickly swept through all of our careers, and, essentially, it's a very helpful tool. That's kind of what it's been marketed at, but it's added a lot of stress to all of our roles as well.

So it kind of begs the question, like, how do most professionals feel in twenty twenty six? So after running ten plus cohorts of live trainings with hundreds of people in each cohort and training over two thousand five hundred senior leaders, this is the sentiment that we're kind of getting. Everyone is saying we're fine, and then we start crying because it's like a lot. You know? It's a lot to balance our roles and to learn this whole new thing as well.

And the three kind of main key reasons why that's coming up again and again is, first of all, the playbooks that we are used to working are no longer working. So me doing SEO before is very different to me doing SEO now. Like, instead of ranking on Google, I'm now trying to rank on AI search. The KPIs are all different. Management's got a lot of pressure on me now being like, hey, what are we doing? Traffic or impressions are dropping. What's going on? But actually, revenue's going up. So the things we're used to doing is no longer working.

If you're in CRO or whatever your job is, it's probably shifted quite a lot. You're also expected to do more with less, either less time, less money, or less people. The expectations of what you do day to day is now going up, but you're not actually given the time to learn the new tool. You also have usually less budgets because budgets are being cut. And there's a lot of mandates from companies that are, like, if you can't, we'll only hire headcount if you can prove that AI can't do it, which means you need to figure out how to do this with AI or prove that you can't, which just takes time.

The third thing is job insecurity. Like, I think we're all feeling a lot of pressure, and jumping on LinkedIn for just five minutes makes you feel like you're behind. Brené Brown in her recent book Strong Ground talks about the fear of irrelevance being the strongest shame trigger in our professional lives. So this is just amplifying the fact that we're all feeling behind, but you're actually not alone.

So we started this thing called Opal University where we teach AI in the fundamentals. And within a couple of weeks, these are the companies that are joining the cohorts. And these are the companies that you would think have, quote unquote, figured it out. But it starts to paint this picture of the fact that, oh, maybe we are all feeling this way, and actually we aren't behind at all.

So the old narrative that we kind of might be feeling now is like AI is here and everything we're used to doing is no longer working. What I love to reshift that to is: there's actually this amazing news. There's never been a more valuable and exciting time to be in tech and learning a brand new skill. Twenty percent of people that have completed these cohorts have either got a new job or got a promotion. So it just shows you that if you can do a little bit to match the skill, the reward is asymmetrical, which is amazing.

Dharmesh, who's the co-founder of HubSpot, talks about today, it's gonna bring your own device to work. Tomorrow, it's bring your own agents. So what you're gonna learn here during this one hour call is how to build agents that you can use to prove that you should get a promotion or, you know, when you get hired for a new job, this is your new resume.

In the best use and after using AI a lot, you're also beginning to realize that AI is actually pretty stupid, and it desperately needs you, the expert, to guide it. So AI will just always follow what you ask it to, but it needs someone smart enough and with enough career experience to be able to guide it to do the right things. And likely that's what you've been doing your whole life.

So what do we do when we feel uncertain? We like to learn something new. So I'm Steven. In the last year I've been training a lot of professionals, which is really cool. I've already talked about how a lot of these people are getting promotions and new jobs. It's not because of my training, it's just because every company is so desperate for someone on the inside to learn the skill, and they'll reward someone learning the skill so much. But before going all in on AI, I actually built and sold a marketing agency, and I led growth at four different startups. And these are just some of the logos just to show you that you're in the right place and you're definitely not behind.

This is my reminder to myself and maybe to you that drinking water is good. Let's have a little bottle break.