I took to AI like a duck to water.
My last full-time job ended in March 2023, right around the release of GPT-3. It was a welcome distraction while I figured out how to dive back into entrepreneurship and recalibrate my life. I've always enjoyed puzzles, and it was something to experiment with and understand. It offered an escape from the reality of my crumbling life, making sense when many other things didn't. And I came to rely on it more and more, first with simple tasks like emails, recipes, and deciding what to watch on TV, and then as a business strategist and coach. There were frustrations, too, like when it made me a white man and a plant instead of a Black woman when I asked it to draw a picture of me.
Then a contractor let me down on an important client. I needed Power BI reports, but deadlines kept slipping, the work wasn't looking right, and every change came with a request for more money. So I made the reports myself with ChatGPT. I knew enough about data and relational databases to be dangerous; I had even taken a Power BI course on Udemy. I just couldn't make the leap from theory to practice. ChatGPT helped me get to what I needed to produce for the client without having to learn everything: I went from setup to bug fixes to understanding the data in record time, and I was hooked. It got me what I needed faster than when I was trying to learn it on Udemy and made me smarter in the process because I was able to learn what I needed when I needed to in the context of the problem I was solving.
By the time the AI slop got really bad - and I'll admit I contributed to some of it - I was already invested and getting more ambitious, analyzing my clients' requirements, configuring solutions, improving my marketing, building and hosting my own website, and eventually building a SaaS multi-tenant platform for nonprofits and small businesses. I felt like Eddie Morra in Limitless after he takes NZT - not smarter, exactly, but suddenly able to access everything I already knew, organized and available, all at once.
I have heard it said that the next great transformation, the AI one, is going to be about the availability of knowledge and intelligence, and the ability to harness it to amplify what you do.
That has been my experience. But it has not been everyone's.
Here is the other conversation people are having with AI.
There is too much information and misinformation, and it all looks the same. Who should we believe? How do we know what we are looking at? How do we discern what is true? Is AI going to take our jobs, be used for mass surveillance, steal our data, our IP? These are real questions, and they are causing some people to turn away from AI and rely instead on what they can understand and what is familiar. That is not irrational. That is a reasonable response to such a big and unknown thing.
I spoke to a successful entrepreneur the other day who told me that AI has become so pervasive and confusing that people are going back to relying on what they can see and touch, meeting in person rather than online, and not believing things unless it's from someone they trust. I did not think he was wrong.
Whether reasonable or not, the retreat has a cost. And the cost is not evenly distributed. History is already repeating itself.
We have been here before. The original digital divide, the gap between those with reliable broadband and those without, was supposed to close on its own once the infrastructure caught up. It didn't. A 2020 OECD survey cited by McKinsey found that only half of Black workers had the advanced digital skills needed to thrive in our increasingly tech-driven economy, compared with 77% of white workers. The divide didn't just persist; it compounded. I think of the executive director running a Baltimore nonprofit on a shoestring, spending nights on grant applications because the work doesn't stop during the day, already stretched too thin to add one more thing to learn, even if that thing could change everything. AI is the same pattern moving ten times faster, and the people who were already on the wrong side of the last divide are the ones who can least afford to fall behind in this one.
The divide is between those who have integrated AI into how they work and live, and those who are in retreat. The digital divide taught us that these gaps do not close on their own. They close when people who have made it across reach back and help others across. That is still possible. But the window is moving faster than anything we have navigated before.
AI is an amplifier. But amplification requires someone to reach for it. And right now, the people with the most to gain are the ones being given the least reason to try.