I feel bad for my agency friends

The Window Gets Smaller Every Month

Elon just said AI will do anything digital at a superhuman level by the end of next year.

I've been sitting with that.

You can take an old laptop, install an AI agent, and give that machine a brain that outperforms most knowledge workers.

In seconds.

The hardware already exists in millions of homes.

Many of the models are free.

And even the frontier models are cheap. $20 to $200 a month.

That combination is going to break things in ways most people aren't ready for.

And I genuinely feel bad.

I have friends who run agencies.

Copywriters. Designers. Media buyers. SEO specialists.

Good people. Smart people.

People who built real skills over 10, 15, 20 years.

And I watch them talk about AI the same way taxi drivers talked about Uber in 2013.

"It's a fad."

"It can't do what I do."

"My clients will always need a human."

I heard the same words from my own industry.

When I started warning that AI would threaten virtual assistants, people in my own company thought I was overreacting.

I was losing $29,000 a month.

I flew to the Philippines twice and retrained my entire team on AI.

That decision saved the business.

Most people will have their version of that moment.

The difference is whether they see it coming or it hits them from behind.

The genie is out of the bottle.

Regulators will try to slow it down.

Industries will lobby to protect their margins.

Professionals will insist their job requires something AI can't replicate.

And the weights are already downloaded on millions of machines in every country on earth.

There is no policy, no regulation, and no protest that puts this back in the box.

I think about my kids.

The career paths that existed when I was in college are going to look like blacksmithing by the time they graduate.

I stopped funding the 529 years ago because the institutions teaching those careers haven't caught up to what's already here, let alone what's coming.

I'm fortunate.

I recognized what AI was in 2023, before most people took it seriously.

I invested everything I had into learning it, building with it, and training my team on it.

Local compute. Agent fleets. An entire business model redesigned from the ground up.

And I'm still barely keeping up.

That's the part that scares me.

I've been in this full time for three years and the pace still outstrips my ability to absorb it all.

For someone starting today, the gap between where they are and where the technology already operates is enormous.

It's still closeable.

But the window gets smaller every month.

The people who spend 2026 debating whether AI is real will spend 2027 watching someone who built with it take their clients.

I've watched that movie before with remote work.

Had to explain what a virtual team was in 2016.

By 2020 the whole world was doing it.

The ones who built early owned the market.

The ones who waited spent years trying to catch up.

Some of them still are.

AI is that same window compressed into months instead of years.

The opportunity is real.

So is the threat.

And most people I care about are on the wrong side of it.

I hope they move.

I really do. 🫡

Did You Know?

In 1900 the United States had well over 100,000 working blacksmiths...

Eight years later, Ford launched the Model T.

Within a generation, the trade that had powered civilization for 3,000 years became a hobby.

Nobody who was good at horseshoes saw it as a threat until the road went quiet. 🐴

🗞️ The Tip AI News 🗞️

Perplexity quietly paywalled the feature that made Comet worth having.

I opened Comet yesterday and something was missing.

Browser control, the ability to have the Comet Assistant actually click around and do things for you, was gone.

Silently removed.

Now it requires "computer credits."

No announcement. No email. Just a feature that was there on Monday and behind a meter on Tuesday.

Here's why that stings more than a normal price change.

Remember how Comet launched.

It started as a $200-a-month perk for Perplexity's top-tier Max subscribers.

Then they made it free for everyone.

And Perplexity said publicly that the free move was one that would never change.

The whole pitch was an AI browser that acts as your personal assistant, browsing and clicking on your behalf.

That WAS the product.

Now the product's core feature costs extra, and the promise turned out to have a shelf life.

I uninstalled it immediately.

Not out of spite.

Out of principle, and the principle is the one I keep hammering.

Any feature that lives on someone else's servers can be removed, metered, or repriced the moment their spreadsheet says so.

You don't get a vote.

You get a changelog, if you're lucky.

That's not a Perplexity problem. It's a rented-tool problem.

Every SaaS AI feature you rely on today is one board meeting away from a credit system.

So here's the move.

For anything mission-critical, ask one question before you build on it.

"If they paywall this tomorrow, what's my fallback?"

If you don't have an answer, you don't have a workflow.

You have a subscription to someone else's mood. 😏

😂Meme of the Day

Over to You...

Go have the uncomfortable AI conversation with someone you care about this week...

Before the road goes quiet. 🔥

Jeff J. Hunter 

Founder, AI Persona Method | TheTip.ai

Get paid to solve problems like this → AI Certified Consultant

PS. A week ago I posted that the Claude Community hit 1.6 million... We're already at 1.7 million, with 1,400 join requests my team hasn't even reviewed yet. The people who ARE moving are moving fast. 🚀

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