The AI Skill Gap: Why Waiting Is Your Biggest Risk

Notion is an AI-powered connected workspace for teams. Notion brings all your notes, docs, and projects into one space that just works. It's seamless, flexible, powerful, and actually fun to use. And with AI built right in, you spend less time switching between tools and apps, and more time creating great work. And now with Notion's new custom agents, the busy work that used to take hours or never even happened at all, all runs itself. Most AI still waits for you to prompt it, but custom agents run on schedules and triggers. One person sets it up, building out a workflow for repetitive tasks like weekly reports or triaging feedback, and it becomes a shared resource for the whole team. So try custom agents now at Notion.com/tps. That's all lowercase letters, Notion.com/tps to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show. Notion.com/tps. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to The Procivity Show, podcast where we believe that people like you can get the important things done without sacrificing your health, family, and things that matter to you. I'm T.M. Fan, founder of the Asian Efficiency where we help people become more productive at work in a life. And it is Wednesday. So you know what that means? Another wisdom Wednesday episode, where you are going to get actionable productivity advice in less than 10 minutes. Now we believe that just one tweak a week can lead to massive productivity gains over time. So if you find today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe if you haven't yet. And leave us a review because it helps us grow your show. Now I want to talk to you today about a shift that I'm seeing that reminds me kind of of like the late 90s. I'm dating myself a little bit here when I say that. But if you were around in 1998, you probably remember when Google first came on the scene. Now before that, navigating the internet was kind of a mess of directories and bookmarks, right? It was like Yahoo, geo-states, Lycos. And then all of a sudden there was this tool that changed how we access information forever. Now those who learned how to use Surge Engine's early gain a massive competitive advantage over those who stayed in with the old ways. And what's funny is that we are in that exact same moment right now, but with AI. So the biggest mistake I see people making is thinking that they can wait until the tech kind of settles down or becomes more user-friendly. They think that they're just waiting for the right time to start. But the truth is that waiting is becoming a massive risk. The gap between those who use AI and those who do not is not just growing. It's also accelerating in a really high pace. And this is the thing that's kind of alarming to me in this moment. This is not about having access to the tools because everyone is just literally a browser click away from Chatchy, BT, or Clawed, or any other LLM. The real gap is skill and literacy. I have spent a lot of time embedded in the innovation scene here in Austin, Texas, where I live. And I recently realized that a power law is emerging. I was spending 10 to 12 hours a day using all these different tools. And I saw that the real advantage doesn't come from just knowing that the tool exists, although that is powerful. It comes from knowing how to apply them to solve real problems. Think of it like a compound interest curve. If you start using AI for small tasks today, you are building a foundation of skill. While others are waiting, you are learning how to prompt, how to iterate, how to think in terms of AI capabilities, discovering new tools, what they can and cannot do. But the time that people who are already waiting to finally jump in, the early adopters will be so far ahead that the gap will be nearly impossible to close. And this widening of skill gap I'm talking about, it's not just about being a tech expert. You don't have to be that whatsoever. It is about being an early adopter of a new way of working and thinking. So when I teach AI workshops here in Austin, Texas, I talk about this concept of three levels of AI fluency. Anyone who has ever managed a team will know the astonishing amount of time that goes into reviewing, prioritizing, and assigning tasks. Sometimes it's just a win figuring out who a task should go to. While both notions new custom agents, the busy work is handled. A task rooting agent can send tasks to the right person automatically as soon as they come in. That's all lowercase letters notion.com/tps to try custom agents today. And when you use our link, you're supporting our show, notion.com/tps. To help you understand where you are now, where you need to go, I've developed this little framework called the three levels of AI fluency. Most people currently are probably at level one, which is what I call AI assistance. This is where you go back and forth with a tool like Chat QBT to write an email or to summarize the documents. It's helpful, but it's still somewhat manual. Level two is AI workflows. This is where things get really interesting. Instead of writing a single prompt, you start chaining prompts together to create a repeatable process. You're not just asking for a summary. You are building a system that takes a transcript, extract action items, drafts a follow-up email, and updates your task manager all in one go. And it actually does it for you now. It's not just telling you what to do. It's now executing tasks. And that is what level two is all about, which is AI workflows. Level three is AI agents. These are-- think of them as digital employees that work autonomously, sometimes even 24/7. And I currently manage about 40 of those in my personal life and handle everything from managing my email in-box to doing research, from organizing my life, from everything else in between. And moving through these levels is what creates massive leverage over time. And I've seen this progression free up. When you go from level one and you get there, you might free up like five to eight hours a week. Once you get to level two, you start to free up somewhere between 10 to 20 hours a week. And once you get to level three, which is AI agents, you can free up up to 40, 60 hours a week when you really commit to the process. So the key is to stop thinking about AI as a search engine and start thinking about it as a workflow partner. So you don't have to overall your whole life today to do this. You can start really simple, just like I did. I want you to use AI for one small thing every single day. The power comes from using it every day, not one to week or twice a week every single day. This small daily use compounds into massive leverage over time. When I first started building workflows, I discovered that creating a step-by-step sequence produced consistent outputs every single time. And once I kind of figured it out, I went, oh my gosh, what else can I replicate and system atties in my life? That consistency is what allows you to skill your productivity. And the beautiful thing is once you have these workflows set up, it's kind of set it and forget it. They kind of run in the background, and it just kind of happened. So if you're willing to spend 15 minutes today learning how to move from a simple prompt to a reputable workflow, honestly, you already had 90% of the population. So don't wait for the perfect course or for the perfect tool. Start with the problems you have right now. Use it to draft your next meeting agenda or to brainstorm ideas for a project. And then try to see if the tool can actually do it for you instead of telling you what to do. And the skill you will be building today is the leverage that you will start using tomorrow. So here's your actions that for this week. I want you to identify one repetitive task that you currently doing right now that is time consuming, it's slow, and you want to start thinking about, hey, I wonder if AI could do this for me. So I want you to start thinking about that and see if you can create a workflow where the AI will actually do it for you. Instead of telling you what to do, like chat GPD, we'll oftentimes we'll say, ask it if it can do it for you. And I'll probably be very surprising to see what it can actually do. And I think once you peak your curiosity and kind of go down this rabbit hole, you start to unlock a lot of gains that you didn't think were possible before. So I'm really excited for you. Go ahead and try it out starting today. Remember, start using it every single day. And that is it for today's episode. Thank you so much for joining me today. If you found it helpful, be sure to subscribe if you haven't yet or share with a friend who might be waiting on the sidelines of the AI revolution. And hopefully this will get them started. Thank you again, and I'll see you next week.