Gen X AI
It has been a busy week: updating the materials for and delivering a lunch-and-learn session and another full day training course on AI for IPG members, and preparing a keynote presentation on the future of publishing for a conference in Chicago next week. To prepare for those things, I’ve been reading and talking to a lot of interesting people about how they are using AI at the moment. In between, I made a quick dash up to London for my ten year business school reunion—a room full of smart people from different industries who provide a triangulation to the publishing experience. There are three interesting patterns that kept coming up in all of those different contexts.
There’s a very strong sense of AI use levelling up in ambition and capability. Six or eight months ago, the baseline skill level for non-technical professionals felt like prompting LLMs competently. Most people I talk to see the November 2025 model updates as something of an inflection point for AI use. Now, the combination of more capable basic LLMs, Claude Code and Cowork for development, OpenClaw for the thrusters, and integration with staple tools like Gmail and Notion means that some kind of agentic stack is table stakes for the people I’m talking to.
Secondly, without being ungallant to my friends, it’s interesting that the most interesting things I see are being done by people of a certain age. There’s been a lot of noise in the last week about opposition (in some cases, quite active resistance) to AI being concentrated among Gen Z employees, but it’s a very different picture among my Gen X friends and acquaintances. A literary agent building a personal workflow in Claude, Gmail and Notion. The CEO of a six-person mediatech business that’s shipping at the cadence of a far bigger firm. An army reservist creating what he calls an artificial adjutant as he adjusts to a different pace of life after regimental command. A former investment banker bootstrapping a data business. A consultant thinking deeply about knowledge management and the value sitting in Markdown files. A near-neighbour in the country starting a new martech business after the sale of her last company. An executive coach finding that voice rather than text interfaces with AI changes his thought processes and the nature of his business. An artist using Claude Code to rethink his online presence and finding that it massively accelerates the process. Maybe there’s an inbuilt bias and this just reflects the age and profile of the people I’m friends with, but it feels like there is a sweet spot of people old enough to have learned their fundamentals with the dial-up Internet rather than ChatGPT, entrepreneurial enough to be leaning into new tools, and now having to radically and delightedly reassess their mental models for what can get done in any given block of time. I had a really interesting conversation with the artist about trying to develop an intuition for the size of particular tasks and timing the rhythm of work to fit around token allowances and resets.
Finally, thinking about those people, it’s striking that a lot of them are solo operators or working in small teams, having grown up in larger organisations. I remember being unfairly dismissive of the research showing that companionship was the top use case for AI, but reflecting on this I think there’s a slightly more nuanced view. I don’t think my entrepreneurial friends are looking to AI for emotional support as such, but for it to provide the familiar structure of sounding board and intellectual partnership that they enjoyed in corporate life, with a refreshing side-order of zero pushback/JFDI when thinking moves to doing. That they are able to do so on-demand and cheaper with AI fundamentally changes the cost-base and viability of solo companies and small firms. Some of the examples I’ve given are basically lifestyle businesses (no disrespect: I am proud to have one myself), but if I were in a position to raise an investment fund right now, I don’t think that AI-curious, lean and hungry Gen X-ers would be the worst thesis in the world (definitely lean and hungry: everyone is either on Strava or The Pen).