If you Feel Behind with AI, Read This:

Matt @ Levership

OpenAI released a new feature every 3 days in 2025. I'm telling you that because if you've been feeling like you can't keep up, you're right. You can't. Nobody can. But trying to is the wrong goal anyway. Here's what I actually care about for the businesses I work with: I don't need your HVAC company to know what Anthropic released last Tuesday. I need your HVAC company to be ahead of the other HVAC companies. I don't need your sign shop tracking every new model drop. I need it ahead of the other sign shops. Your market isn't changing at the pace of the models. It's changing at the pace of the companies in it who are starting to figure this out. That's the race you're actually in. And bluntly, most of your competitors still aren't serious about it. I find that terrifying, and I also find it useful for the people I'm working with right now, because that window is open and it won't stay that way. Two things are happening at the same time, and you need a plan for both. The first is what I call the arbitrage. Right now, if you know how to use AI well and your competitors don't, you can do things faster. I'm talking about a company that gets leads in an hour that used to take 400 hours. Proposals done in 20 minutes that used to take a week. Ten pieces of content in the time it used to take to write three. That gap is real and it's available to capture today. The second is harder to think about. At some point, your market redefines itself. The speed advantage disappears because everybody catches up. What "good" looks like changes. You need to win on the arbitrage now while it's there, and you also need to not mistake the arbitrage for the whole game. I had a subcontractor in one of my groups who reverse-engineered his competitors' quotes with AI and won a $700,000 job with a $1,325 spread. He's winning on the arbitrage. But that edge has a shelf life. He knows it. So what actually matters for the longer game? BCG and McKinsey spent two years studying how companies are actually integrating AI. Only 4 to 6 percent are extracting real, compounding business value. The rest hit a J-curve. They hand out tools, people try them, performance drops. They go from doing things one way to spinning faster with more options and less output. The insight I keep coming back to is this: your ability to re-engineer the workflows in your business is now more important than any single workflow you do today. Not knowing every tool. Not tracking every release. Being able to look at a process, find the constraint, and rebuild it with AI in it. That's the skill. And if you build it, you can plug and play whatever model is best next month. You're not betting on a tool. You're building a capability that works no matter what. On the overwhelm: I get it. I've talked to enough business owners who know they need to do something but can't figure out what to prioritize first. That feeling isn't a sign you're behind. It's a sign you're looking at the wrong scoreboard. The scoreboard you actually want to watch is your market, not the AI news cycle. Irrelevance happens when the speed of change outside your organization is faster than the speed of change inside it. That's the gap to close. And you close it one workflow at a time, starting with whatever is most constraining your business right now. Reply and tell me what the hardest constraint in your business is right now. I'll tell you honestly whether I think AI moves it. Matt PS. For those wondering how I actually stay current without reading everything: I have a timed prompt that runs in Perplexity Spaces every Friday. It scans top AI news and relevant LinkedIn threads and throws back what's new and what it challenges in my thinking. One Friday review. I set it up once. It keeps me sharp without the fire hose. If you're drowning in tabs and newsletters, that's worth an hour of your time to set up.