Last Thursday, Gloria Caulfield took the podium at UCF's commencement for the College of Arts and Humanities. She's a VP at Tavistock, the massive Florida real estate development firm. Midway through her speech, she called AI "the next Industrial Revolution."
She seems like a nice lady
Thousands of graduates booed. One yelled "AI sucks." When she followed up with "only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives," the same crowd erupted in cheers. Caulfield looked confused. She nimbly pivoted calling AI a "bipolar topic."
It's not bipolar. Those students understood her perfectly. They just graduated with communications, media, film, and humanities degrees into a job market that is actively shrinking underneath them. They weren't confused about AI. They were angry about what it means for their résumé.
Bit of a falloff
Here's the thing: the students and Caulfield are both right. AI is the next industrial revolution. And yes, it is shredding the traditional entry-level job market. Both things are true at the same time. The question is what you do with that information.
Trend is not great
The Skill Gap Just Collapsed
For decades, the barrier to building a real business was technical. You needed developers, designers, data analysts, capital. Starting a software company meant raising money. Starting a media company meant buying equipment. The humanities kid with a great idea and no code skills was stuck writing cover letters.
Today, a person with clear thinking and the ability to communicate with AI can build a newsletter with automated monetization, deploy an outbound sales agent that books meetings while they sleep, stand up a landing page, process inbound leads, and manage a CRM all without writing a single line of traditional code. The cost to launch a real business has dropped from six figures to a few hundred dollars and a weekend.
This is good news
Chris Koerner, who has started 75+ businesses, has been documenting this shift in real time. He recently featured a guy who handed an AI agent $200 and a set of instructions. Thirteen days later, the agent had built him a business doing $8,400 a month in recurring revenue. Koerner himself fed a video transcript into Claude, generated a 30-page business plan in three clicks, attached a $9 Stripe payment link, and started making sales within minutes. He's also highlighted people using AI to win government contracts on SAM.gov, repurpose corporate webinars into $1,000-a-pop LinkedIn lead magnets, and automate outreach for home service companies that never would have touched software five years ago.
This isn't Silicon Valley stuff. These are landscapers, consultants, and side hustlers.
You can accomplish a lot by yourself now
The Gameplan
Whether you're a parent thinking about your kid's future or a mid-career professional watching your industry automate around you, here's how to start positioning yourself right now.
First, learn to prompt, not to code. The new literacy is the ability to clearly describe a problem, provide context, and direct an AI tool toward a solution. That's a humanities skill. English majors, communications grads, philosophy students: you've been training for this and didn't know it.
Word people are better than math people here
Second, pick a boring problem and solve it with AI. The biggest opportunities aren't in building the next ChatGPT. They're in taking a manual, annoying, expensive process inside a real business: scheduling, follow-up, reporting, intake and automating it for them. Service businesses, dealerships, medical offices, law firms, property managers. These industries are desperate for help and have zero internal AI capability.
Third, build in public and start small. Launch a newsletter. Create a simple tool. Offer to automate one workflow for one business for free, then charge the next ten. The cost of failure is almost nothing now, which means the cost of experimentation is almost nothing too.
Fourth, stop waiting for permission. The credential is the work. Ship something. Show someone what you built. That portfolio is worth more than any degree right now.
Here is how I would price your services
This Is a Golden Age
I know that sounds tone-deaf to someone staring down student debt with no job prospects. But the honest truth is that the old playbook: get the degree, get the entry-level job, climb the ladder was already failing people long before AI showed up.
What AI also did is hand every single person with curiosity and work ethic the same tools that used to cost millions to access. The playing field hasn't been this level in a century. Simple ideas can bear fruit. A one-person operation can look and perform like a ten-person team.
Those UCF grads were right to be frustrated. But the ones who channel that frustration into building instead of booing are going to be just fine.
The Linkedin crowd is generally optimistic
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