How to Actually Use AI in 2026

Everybody is giving you AI advice right now and most of it will hurt you. We're gonna go over 15 pieces of advice that sound smart but will set you back years. And I'll give you the actual advice you should listen to instead. Welcome to the Martell Method. I went from rehab at 17 to building a $100 million empire and being a Wall Street Journal best-selling author. In this podcast, I'll show you exactly how to build a life and business you don't grow to hate. And make sure you don't miss anything by subscribing to my newsletter at martell method dot com. Number one, fire your team and replace them with AI agents. Why this is advice? Because having people on your team makes the business fun. Why would you get rid of them? You're ding dong. Business is about people. AI can't build relationships. It can't feel the energy in the room. Your team is your competitive advantage. AI should make them 10 times better, not replace them. Better advice what I would tell people is use AI to be your co-pilot for your team. Encourage them, train them, show them what they can do so that they can do their best work. Not replace them. Number two, automate everything in your business immediately. Why this is s**t advice? If your process is broken, automating a broken process just makes it broken faster. It makes it s**t here. I've seen founders weigh six months automating a sales process that shouldn't exist because it didn't work in the first place. They're like, I'm going to use AI to make the sales automated. It's like you can't even sell. Better advice would be fix your process manually first. Elon must did this with the Model 3 production line. And then he overoptimized it and automated it. And then he came back and he added people so that he could learn. Once you know what actually works, then you start using AI to automate the biggest bottlenecks. Number three, let AI handle all customer service to save you money. This is bad advice. Customer conversations are gold mines. It's worth a golden nugget slip. You got to go mine for it. That's where you learn what's broken. You learn what features are built. You learn what problems to solve. Cut that off in your flying blind. The better advice would be use AI for the simple repetitive questions or response times. Have it answer calls answer questions. What time are you open? Easy stuff. But keep humans in the loop for the human touch points. Business is in B to B. Business to business is H to H human to human. Number four, don't bother learning how AI works. Why this is advice? If you don't know how the AI thinks, you won't know its limitation. You won't know how to craft it. You won't know how to massage it. You won't know how to direct it. I've seen founders make decisions based on completely made up data because they didn't understand how the AI makes up the answer and it made up the data. It hallucinated. So improved advice is learn the AI fundamentals. That way you know what is possible and what isn't. Here's a pro tip. Ask AI to teach you AI. You can ask it. How does a language model work? Make it simple. Use a metaphor. Use a simile and watch it teach you so that you can then learn how to craft it and design it to make it even better. Number five, build everything with AI from day one. This is why that's bad advice. Most people don't even know what they're building yet. So I recommend all the time. Start manual. Learn what works. Go into a company, into a team. Reverse engineer it. Then add AI to scale what's proven based on what you learn. Reverse advice would be figure out what works manually first and then accelerate the process with AI. Don't replace it. Then use AI to scale it. Thanks for listening to the Martell method. Before we get back to the episode, if you're like a real AI founder and you have a product and customers who are paying you and you want to scale fast, here's a deal. I want to work with you at Martell Ventures. You don't need another investor. What you need is a partner with distribution, proven playbooks, most importantly connections. You'll focus on adding customers instead of you wasting all your time fundraising. So if you want to work with me, just go to damartell.com/ventures. Number six, build your strategy around the latest AI. This is why this is horrible advice. Not too long ago, AI changed every three months. Then it was every month. Now it's every week and sometimes every day. Learning what's hot today will put you in a position to waste a lot of time learning about something that's not even relevant tomorrow. What our advice is to focus on solving problems that existed for years, pains that people have, as Jeff Bezos often said about Amazon, there's never going to be a day where the customer doesn't want their package faster or for the website to load faster. So use AI today for what works best today and go deep, master the skill of one platform. So that way as the platforms evolve, you'll already know how the whole suite of tools work. Focus on solving problems that have existed for years or will always exist. Think about pain. Number seven, let AI make all your business decisions. Bad advice, so bad. Here's a deal. AI still hallucinates and it makes mistakes. If you think about the concept of how AI works where it's predicting the next word, by definition, it'll always give you the most probabilistic answer. The median, water down answer, no matter what. And the best companies were build off innovation. The best companies were build off intuition. You shouldn't trust it with million dollar problems. But better advice would be use AI for insights and analysis. That's what it can do better than anybody. Then verify it with people who've successfully made those decisions to inform if it's the right strategy. So use it to do research and tell you and then take that blueprint, show it to somebody's been there before. It says does this make sense? And they go, wow, that's really smart. But you need to be the director. Let the AI do the task. Number eight, replace all your brainstorming with AI. Bad. Bad advice. So crazy. AI can only reference what's existed before. So by definition, it'll only allow you to brainstorm things that other people have talked to in the past. So if you're really starting from nothing and you want just to understand what's going on, that's cool. But brainstorming requires creativity. Brain storming is about finding these nuances. When you think of like Henry Ford, learning from the meat packers in Chicago to create the production line, which is how modern cars are still made today, but borrowed from inspiration from a completely different industry. You can't do that with AI because it's only going to give you things that are probably going to work based on what's worked in the past, not find new opportunities. One of the things that AI can't do is have vision. That is your job to see a future that doesn't exist yet, but should better advice would be to use AI to spark ideas, to research things, to expand on concepts, to test crazy ideas in the real world from a validation point of view, not to be the driver of innovation. Number nine. Meat AI is much data as possible to get the best results. This is bad advice even though it sounds so great on the surface is because AI has this concept called context. And if you give it too much information, what happens is you have context rot. Too much data confuses the AI. It messes it up. It doesn't understand what's relevant. It's like giving somebody 10 maps when they ask for simple directions. You need to use the most concise, cleanest context that actually solves your problem. If you don't get the context right, you'll get context rot. Before we get back to the episode, if you want to jumpstart your week with my top stories and tactics, be sure to subscribe to the Martell Method newsletter. It's where you'll elevate your mindset, fitness, and business in less than five minutes a week. Find it at Martell Method dot com. Number 10. Leave AI to your IT guys. It's just bad advice. Saying that you don't need to learn AI because your job is an AI and leave that to the technical person on your team is like saying that you don't want to use a car because you're not a mechanic. AI today is literally program using English. So if you're hearing the words coming out of my mouth, I know you know how to use AI because you can talk better advice would be, hey, let's train everyone on how to use AI to do what they need 10 times more, 10 times faster, 10 times better. Like I said, AI is for humans. That's why it's coded in English. That is the first time in the history of technology where a technology is programmed in English. So don't just leave it to the technical guys. Everybody should learn this. Number 11. Start by picking the coolest AI tools. This is advice because cool technology doesn't solve problems. Cool technology is just cool technology. Nobody wakes up and says I need some AI. They go, I need to solve a problem. So if you're always just picking the coolest AI tools, then yeah, you'll know a lot about tools, but you won't actually know how to solve problems. Another advice I want to tell my team is to find the problem that's worth solving. Figure out what's the sequence of solutions and then find the AI to solve it. I use a framework called the theory of constraints. You can ask AI about it and it'll teach it to you and that is how you choose the right problems to solve with AI. So start with the right problem that you're having and then go find the right tool to solve it. Number 12. Use only one AI tool for everything. If you think that one tool can do everything, then you'll have the most watered down solution to your problems. Do you only have one social media app on your phone or do you have several? Why? Because each one does something great. It's the same thing with AI and the tools. Each tool does a thing better than the rest of them so you need to know which tool to use for the right moment. So if you're using chat GBT for everything, here's my advice for you. Build a toolkit of specialized AI. Match the right tool to the right problem. You might be using cloud to do writing. You might use Gemini to do research because it has 3.5 tons more information than any other language model. You might still use chat GBT for certain things, but you might also find a tool to generate images that are better than all those through I just mentioned. Number 13. Use every AI tool that comes out. So this is advice because you don't want to be just running around using every new tool that comes out. What you want to do is what I just said, which is find the three to five that you need for your work that solves 90% of your problems, like actually your real problems that go deep so that you can become a master in those tools. I know a lot of people that just get addicted to the new tools and I just. called that productive procrastination. They're addicted to the newness, but they actually don't do anything with the tools. In many ways, they are the tool, but I'm shh. Number 14, just copy, paste other people's prompts. So easy, shh. Advice, why? Their outputs are not what you need as a result. If you just keep copying everybody else's prompts and you're just gonna look like everybody else, those prompts work for those people based on their problems, not yours. Generic prompts create generic output. The better advice is understand how to create your own prompts, understand your process, your inputs, your specific outputs, what problem are you trying to solve and then create your prompt based on, maybe that is inspiration, but have it customized based on what you need. Number 15, AI will give you a competitive advantage just by using it. Pope advice, it's so crap. Look, here's a deal. AI doesn't give you anything. It's just a thing you're using. I know a lot of people that use AI every day and their life looks exactly because they don't understand how to actually use it to get their life moving forward. Just using AI won't get you anywhere. It's about how you use it. So my advice for you instead would be your advantage comes from combining AI with your unique process, your relationships, your expertise. That's the moat. That's where you take you plus AI to create real value. Now I know what I just gave you feels like a lot and some of it was even controversial. It's like master one, go learn the other ones, build your toolkit, but here's a deal. All I need for me right now is one mindset shift that changed the way you think about AI. I just need some feedback to know that you got what I was sharing. So ask yourself out of all those ideas which one did you need to hear most today? Thanks for listening to Martell Method. If you like this episode, could you do me a huge favor and go leave a review? This helps us get the podcast more ears and helps more people get unstuck reclaim their freedom and build their empire. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]