Musings on AI as an equalizer and why your idea deserves to exist.
Quick story time…
I’ve been teaching the same class for four years. The final assignment is a presentation, a Pecha Kucha presentation based on a self help book or memoir. Before you picture a TED talk, understand that the rubric is a yardstick so each group knows what excellent and poor looks like. It’s a chance for me to see who the group or in some cases who is the student in front of me. Can they organize their thoughts? Can they follow directions? Can the slides advance every 20 seconds automatically using the animation feature of their preferred presentation platform. Nerves and all, they have to show up and perform.
Last year I told students they could use AI with one condition. They had to tell me exactly how they used it, what tool they used, and what they had to do to prompt it to get their result. Full transparency and accountability by doing an AI reflection write up.
Last year, a handful of students took me up on it.
This year? More than half the class.
What I found interesting was how they used AI. Some used it to scaffold their ideas. Some used it to format the slides. Some used it to script their notes so they could actually look up from the computer. One student figured out how to use AI to auto-advance his slides every 20 seconds which, if you’ve ever watched someone frantically click through a presentation while trying to remember what they’re saying, you understand why this was a small revolution.
This year had some of the best presentations I’ve seen in three years of teaching this class.
And then one student asked me something that had not happened ever. He wanted feedback on his presentation skills…not his slides, not his content. His presence. His delivery. His confidence in the room. His summer internship would be a lot of presentation and he wanted to know what he could improve before he started.
One group misread the instructions entirely and had to redo their presentation. In minutes during class. Because AI let them rebuild without panic.
At the end of every year, my goal is the same: get these students more confident presenting in person, and help them get over the anxiety of standing in front of a room of people and being seen. What I realized this year is that when the tool handles the parts that used to eat their cognitive load: the formatting, the transitions, the scripting. They could finally focus on the part that actually mattered.
The human part.
That’s when I understood: you can look at AI as cheating. Or you can look at it as an equalizer. Because when everyone had access to the same tool, the playing field didn’t flatten. Actually, it leveled up.
The Gate Was Always the Problem — Not You
So much of what we call “knowledge work” has been built on a very specific set of things: reading the right things, knowing the right things, and demonstrating mastery in formats that reward a narrow kind of fluency. The person who writes well, speaks well, can code, organizes & formats well, navigates the system well…they win. Not always because they are the best however it’s their natural strength and a skills they’ve honed over the years. Sometimes just because they had more practice, better schooling, sponsorship, coaching, and access to certain resources meant they perform better.
What happens when the performance scaffolding becomes available to everyone?
What happens when the person who would have spent 80% of their energy on the slide deck can now spend 80% of their energy on presenting what they actually know?
Let’s be honest about something. The traditional route to bringing an idea to life whether it be in a classroom, in a boardroom, or in a business assumed a fairly specific set of starting conditions: education in the right areas, capital or connections, and enough bandwidth in your life to get from concept to execution. For a lot of people those conditions were never fully in place. The gap wasn’t a personal failing. It was structural.
The data has been sitting with us on this. Over 90% of global enterprises are projected to face critical skills shortages by 2026, and the skills most in demand are exactly the ones AI can now help anyone develop faster. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s 2025/2026 report flagged a widening “AI Readiness Gap” thus separating entrepreneurs with access to AI from those without, and calling AI literacy no longer a luxury but an economic necessity.
In other words: the gap is real, it’s recognized, and the window to close it is right now.
The Equalizer Isn’t Magic. It’s a Scaffold.
I want to be precise about what I mean when I call AI an equalizer because it’s not magic and it’s not a shortcut. What it is, is a scaffold.
If you know what you want to do but couldn’t always put the steps in place, AI can help you build the framework. If you have expertise and perspective but struggled to translate that into a document, a course, a proposal, a plan, AI can help you get it out of your head and into a form other people can engage with.
Your idea is still yours. Your voice is still yours. Your lived experience, your critical thinking, your understanding of the audience you’re serving are still yours and no algorithm can replicate that. What AI does is help you coordinate, organize, research, analyze, and execute around what is already uniquely and irreplaceably you.
Solo-founded startups surged from 23.7% in 2019 to 36.3% by mid-2025 which is a fundamental shift in who gets to build. A complete solopreneur operating stack now runs between $3,000 and $12,000 annually which is a 95–98% reduction in operating costs compared to traditional staffing models. The infrastructure that used to require a team, a budget, and a building now fits in a laptop and a vision.
New business applications are running at over 440,000 a month that is more than 90% faster than pre-pandemic rates. People aren’t waiting to be given permission anymore. They’re building.
Learning Is Changing.
Here’s something I think about as someone who works in adult education, what we call human development outside the corporate jargon: people learn in radically different ways: audio learners, visual learners, kinesthetic learners, and reading/writing learners to name a few. Most people don’t fit into one instead they blend these styles depending on the subject matter or topic.
For adult learners who bring subject matter expertise, work and lived experience and a variety of technical skills to the table, a tool like AI meets you where you are. It doesn’t require you to sit through the parts you already know to get to the part you need. And it dramatically compresses the time between I want to understand this and I can now do something with this. Realizing that everyone learns different allows individuals to take learning into their own hands because knowing how you learn and what you need to learn faster is really what makes AI a game changer.
53% of U.S. employees plan to proactively learn AI skills within the next six months, and 48% believe AI skills will accelerate their careers. But what’s more interesting than the formal workplace numbers is what’s happening at the edges. The people who were never inside the system to begin with, using AI to build their way in.
Gen Z and Gen X founders now use generative AI at nearly identical rates which is a sign that AI is genuinely democratizing opportunity across generations, not concentrating it in the hands of the already tech-fluent.
This Is Why Pink Slip to Permission Slip Matters to Me
I’ll tell you directly: there are parts of this newsletter where I used AI.
Still my idea. Still my words. Still my intentions and my vision for how I want it to exist in the world. But AI gave me the scaffold to get from idea to something real, faster than I could have alone. It helped me think through the steps, organize the pieces, fill in the gaps between what I knew and what I needed.
That is not cheating. That is using the tools available to you.
And here’s what I want you to hear, especially if you’re someone who has spent years with dreams on a shelf because you didn’t have all the pieces: this is your time. Not because the world suddenly got easier because it hasn’t but because the gap between having an idea and being able to test it, build it, and put it out there has never been smaller.
Does using AI guarantee success? No. But it gets you from thought to action faster than anything we’ve had before. And for people who have never had the runway, the funding, or the access faster matters.
Many people are building something lightweight and flexible before they ever formalize it. They call it minimal viable product. The right conditions are not coming. You build them and now is the time.
You Are the Variable AI Cannot Replicate
The thing that makes your idea worth building is not something AI has. It’s your perspective. Your story. Your understanding of who you’re serving and why it matters. Your ethics, your integrity, your willingness to stay in the work when it gets hard.
Think about that student who asked for feedback on his presentation skills. AI didn’t make him a better presenter. It cleared enough space for him to become one. The human development still happened because he finally had room to breathe.
That’s the version of this I’m interested in. Not AI replacing what’s human. AI making more room for it.
You are the driver. AI is the vehicle. Where you go is still your decision.
If this landed — you might need to be in the room.
Pink Slip to Permission Slip is a free live conversation on June 11th at 11am for women navigating layoffs, pivots, or the quiet itch that something has to change.
We’ll talk data, routines, AI without the overwhelm, and what it actually looks like to bet on yourself right now.
Link to register: Bring someone who needs it.
Sources
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). (2025/2026). Global Report: From Uncertainty to Opportunity.gemconsortium.org
Deloitte. (2026). State of AI in the Enterprise. deloitte.com
IDC / Workera. (2025). Closing the Gap: Verifying AI Skills in the Enterprise. workera.ai
OECD. (2025). Bridging the AI Skills Gap: Is Training Keeping Up? oecd.org
Intuit QuickBooks. (2025). 2026 Entrepreneurship Trends. quickbooks.intuit.com
Fortune. (May 2026). Solo founders are using AI to do the work of entire teams. fortune.com
Stanford HAI / OECD. (2026). AI Index Report / AI Adoption Statistics. hai.stanford.edu
McKinsey. (May 2025). The State of AI. McKinsey
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