Here's What I'd Learn Instead of AI Automation in 2027
An AI automation agency owner making seven figures a year argues the easy money in his own industry is closing fast, then lays out what's actually worth building toward next.
Posted
yesterday
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Talking Head
sincere
Views
7K
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57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
AI agents are rapidly closing the knowledge and skill gaps that made AI automation profitable, but the automation industry itself is the most durable place to stand because it is the one doing the replacing, not the one being replaced.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run an AI automation agency or freelance practice and are watching implementation work get easier for clients to do themselves.
You're building a service business around AI tools and want a read on where client demand is headed through 2027-2030.
You're deciding whether to keep building custom automation systems or pivot toward workshops, training, and strategic advising.
SKIP IF…
You're looking for a step-by-step automation build tutorial, this is market-trend commentary, not a build-along.
You're not in or adjacent to the AI automation or agency space, the predictions are specific to that business model.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Two benchmarks, AutomationBench and GDPval, that AI agents scored near zero on a year ago are now cracking 50-60%, and the knowledge gap that let automation specialists charge a premium is closing fast. That doesn't mean AI automation is dying, the same wave is hitting every white-collar industry, and automation itself is the industry doing the replacing rather than getting replaced, which the author argues is the most durable place to stand as labor gets automated away. He predicts the first half of 2027 brings a surge of newly aware business owners wanting help, but the work shifts from building custom systems to teaching teams how to use AI agents themselves: workshops, training, and strategic direction over implementation. His closing advice is to put dramatically more time into sales and marketing than technical skill, since technical ability is becoming commoditized and only getting cheaper to simulate with agents.
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Opens with his credibility ($10M through AI automation) and the industry-wide incentive to downplay how fast agents are improving, then states the thesis plainly.
02:10 – 03:14
02 · Automation Bench and GDPval
Two benchmarks for autonomous business automation went from near-zero to 50-60% scores in under a year, and extrapolating the trend suggests saturation within months.
03:14 – 04:31
03 · We saw this with website builders
Draws a parallel to how AI and no-code hosting commoditized web design, a specialized skill that used to require paying someone a lot of money.
04:31 – 05:57
04 · Website designers that still make bank
Some designers still land six-figure-plus deals in a commoditized market, because they're extraordinary at sales and marketing, not at the underlying technical work.
05:57 – 07:05
05 · The knowledge asymmetry bet
The share of people who've used a genuinely capable AI model has jumped from roughly 10-20% to 30% in a year, and he expects the next jump to be sudden, not gradual.
07:05 – 07:56
06 · The floor is always rising
Standing still while the average capability floor rises is the same as falling behind, compared to money losing value if it isn't earning interest.
07:56 – 10:27
07 · Is AI automation even worth getting into in 2027?
Re-poses the question as a rhetorical hook, then argues the same forces hitting automation are hitting every white-collar industry, using brokers, car dealers, and lawyers as examples of knowledge-gatekeeping roles already being compressed.
10:27 – 12:52
08 · The difference with our industry
The core argument: in an economy where AI automates away knowledge work, the industry doing the automating is more durable than the industries being automated.
12:52 – 14:46
09 · The first half of 2027
Predicts a surge of newly AI-aware business owners seeking help once they see competitors pulling ahead, but says the help they'll want looks more like strategic advice than raw implementation.
14:46 – 15:33
10 · After 2027, I don't know
Admits the limits of forecasting past a certain horizon rather than pretending to know how the back half of 2027 and beyond plays out.
15:33 – 16:22
11 · The phasing out of drag and drop builders
Cites internal market analysis showing declining project share for tools like Make, Zapier, n8n, and Power Automate relative to coding-based tools like Claude Code and Codex.
16:22 – 17:10
12 · Move your outputs to a higher bandwidth medium
Argues that plain text and simple static images are losing impact, and that video, 3D visualization, and simulation are becoming the higher-value deliverable.
17:10 – 18:32
13 · From implementation to upskilling
The service mix is shifting from mostly building client systems toward education, workshops, team training, and embedded consulting as more people can build things themselves.
18:32 – 19:12
14 · Teaching teams Claude Cowork
Describes a workshop format: teaching a team general AI fluency, then building the specific internal tools an admin rolls out to the rest of the team.
19:12 – 19:58
15 · Short-term growth hacking opportunities
Expects more frequent but shorter-lived market opportunities as the overall pace of change increases.
19:58 – 21:19
16 · Sales and marketing are 100x as valuable
Argues technical skill has evaporated as a differentiator and that sales, marketing, and delivery systems now deserve roughly 100x the attention technical skill gets.
21:19 – 21:52
17 · The most profitable year of AI automation to date
Predicts 2027 will be the single most profitable year for AI automation work, even as it may also mark the start of the industry's longer decline.
21:52 – 22:25
18 · I didn't make this video to scare people
Clarifies his intent was to help people evolve their business model, not to spread fear, while standing by the forecast.
22:25 – 23:59
19 · Maker School
Pitches his AI automation training program, Maker School, with a first-customer-in-90-days guarantee.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
AutomationBench and GDPval went from models scoring near zero to 50-60% in under a year, gaining roughly 5-10 percentage points a month.
At the current pace of benchmark progress, both could be saturated between December and March, forcing a much harder version 2 that gets solved in months instead of a year.
Knowledge asymmetry, knowing more about AI than the client does, is the real source of AI automation agencies' pricing power, and that gap is closing.
Building a website used to require specialized coding and DNS knowledge worth paying for; today an AI agent can do most of it, and the same shift is coming for automation.
Website designers who still land six-figure deals survive on sales and marketing, not technical skill, since the underlying HTML and CSS is fully commoditized.
If you stay in the same place while the average AI capability floor keeps rising, you're not standing still, you're falling behind relative to everyone else.
Every white-collar industry, accounting, sales, IT, networking, SaaS, design, is being hit by the same benchmark acceleration and knowledge-gap closure as AI automation.
In an economy where AI automates away knowledge work, the industry doing the automating is a more durable place to stand than the industries being automated.
Real estate brokers, car dealers, mortgage brokers, and parts of law built fees on specialized knowledge in risk-asymmetric transactions, the same category of work now compressing to a few clicks.
A surge of newly AI-aware business owners is expected in the first half of 2027, once they see competitors who adopted AI pulling ahead.
Drag-and-drop automation builders like Make, Zapier, n8n, and Power Automate are losing share to coding-based tools like Claude Code and Codex, based on freelance-platform project data.
Higher-bandwidth outputs, video, 3D visualization, simulation, are becoming more valuable than static text or simple imagery as the baseline of what's expected keeps rising.
The service mix is shifting from roughly 70% building client systems toward a closer split with upskilling, workshops, and embedded team training.
If you spend time improving technical skill today, spend roughly 100 times that amount improving sales, marketing, and delivery systems, up from about 10x a year ago.
2027 is likely to be AI automation's single most profitable year to date, even as it may also mark the start of the industry's long-term decline.
Takeaway
Sales skill now outweighs technical skill by 100x
WHERE THIS IS HEADING
AI agents are closing the technical and knowledge gaps that made automation work profitable, so the leverage left is picking the right thing to build and selling it well.
01AI automation is not going to last forever
AI agents have gone from needing API documentation spoon-fed to them to autonomously automating an entire business from a single casual request.
The edge that made AI automation profitable, knowing more about AI than clients do, shrinks every month as more people learn the tools themselves.
02Automation Bench and GDPval
AutomationBench and GDPval, benchmarks for real automation and business tasks, went from near-zero scores to 50-60% in under a year.
At the current pace of roughly 5-10 percentage points a month, both benchmarks could saturate between December and March, forcing a much harder version 2.
03We saw this with website builders
Website building used to require specialized coding and DNS knowledge worth paying for; today an AI agent or a no-code host does most of it for free.
The same commoditization that hit custom web development is coming for AI automation implementation, where connecting APIs no longer requires a specialist.
04Website designers that still make bank
Designers still landing six-figure deals on commoditized HTML and CSS survive on sales and marketing skill, not technical superiority.
Being merely good, not extraordinary, isn't enough once a skill is commoditized; you either become extraordinary at something adjacent or expectations for that work drop.
05The knowledge asymmetry bet
A year and a half ago, roughly 80-90% of people hadn't used an AI model good enough to write a coherent email; today that's closer to 70%.
As AGI capability becomes visible through mainstream demos, public awareness won't creep up gradually, it will jump dramatically overnight.
06The floor is always rising
Standing still while the average capability floor keeps rising isn't neutral, it's effectively falling behind, the same way uninvested money loses value to inflation.
Treat continuous improvement to the business model as mandatory, not optional, since staying the same size while the market grows means shrinking in relative terms.
07Is AI automation even worth getting into in 2027?
The same forces closing the AI automation opportunity, shrinking knowledge gaps and rising capability floors, are hitting every white-collar industry at the same time.
Brokers, car dealers, mortgage brokers, and parts of law built fees on specialized knowledge in risk-heavy transactions that technology is now compressing to a few clicks.
08The difference with our industry
In an economy where AI automates away knowledge work, being in the industry that does the automating is more durable than being in an industry that gets automated.
Automation, by definition, is the use of technology to reduce labor, which is why the automators are positioned to outlast most of the professions they're replacing.
09The first half of 2027
A wave of business owners with money but little AI awareness will surface in early 2027 once competitors who adopted AI start visibly outperforming them.
What people will pay for is shifting from infrastructure like lead-gen systems and pipelines toward strategic advice on what to build at all.
10After 2027, I don't know
Be honest about forecasting limits past a certain horizon; claiming certainty about a fast-moving market is a bigger credibility risk than admitting uncertainty.
11The phasing out of drag and drop builders
Internal analysis of freelance platform project ratios shows consistent declines in work built on drag-and-drop tools like Make, Zapier, and n8n relative to coding-based tools.
Markets reward whoever adapts to the next tool generation; builder tools would need a major overhaul to reverse that trend.
12Move your outputs to a higher bandwidth medium
As the baseline expectation rises, plain text or simple static images stop being impressive; video, 3D visualization, and simulation become the higher-value deliverable.
13From implementation to upskilling
The work is shifting from roughly 70% building client systems to a more even split with education, workshops, team training, and embedded consulting.
As more people can build what they want, the differentiator moves from execution speed to deciding what's worth building in the first place.
14Teaching teams Claude Cowork
Running workshops that teach a team general AI fluency, then building the specific tools an admin needs to roll out, is a repeatable offer.
15Short-term growth hacking opportunities
Expect more frequent but shorter-lived market opportunities as the pace of change increases, rewarding people who can move fast on narrow windows.
16Sales and marketing are 100x as valuable
Spend roughly 100 times more effort on sales, marketing, and delivery systems than on technical skill, since nearly everyone will soon have agent-simulated technical ability.
Audit funnel leakage, sales-call wording, social proof, and follow-up before investing more time in picking the 'best' technical harness or workflow tool.
17The most profitable year of AI automation to date
2027 is likely to be the single most profitable year for AI automation work, even as that same year may mark the start of its longer decline.
18I didn't make this video to scare people
Hold two things at once: real alarm about how fast benchmarks are moving, and genuine optimism about which industry is best positioned to adapt to it.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
AutomationBench
A benchmark that scores AI agents on their ability to autonomously complete real business automation tasks with little to no human guidance.
GDPval
A benchmark that measures how well AI models perform economically valuable, real-world knowledge work tasks across industries.
Knowledge asymmetry
The gap between how much a seller understands a technology versus how much the buyer does, the usual source of pricing power in emerging-tech services.
Drag-and-drop builder
A visual, no-code automation tool, such as Make, Zapier, or n8n, where users connect apps together without writing code.
AGI
Artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical AI system capable of matching or exceeding human performance across virtually all cognitive tasks.
blunt, credibility-backed opening thesis with no setup needed→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
07:40
“If you're not constantly innovating or improving on this business model in some way, shape or form, you aren't just staying in the same place, you're decreasing.”
sharp framing of a counterintuitive idea, standing still is losing→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
10:50
“In a world where all labor is being automated away, what is more valuable than the very industry that is automating it all away?”
the video's thesis crystallized as a single rhetorical question→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
20:10
“Everything to do with sales and marketing is like 100x as valuable as technical skills.”
specific, quotable number that lands as actionable advice→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
21:25
“2027 will probably be the most profitable year of AI automation to date. But it may also be the beginning of its decline in the market.”
tension and a cliffhanger in one line→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script
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As somebody in the industry that's made close to $10 million through AI automation, I've noticed a lot of incentives perpetuating this idea that AI automation will last forever. Whether you are an automation specialist, or somebody on social media, or a company that sells AI SaaS apps, or what have you, you're afraid to talk negatively about the industry because you think it's going to hit you in the wallet.
So maybe it will, but AI automation is not going to last forever. And I'm making this video for two reasons. The first is that model progress on automation benchmarks, like AutomationBench and GDPVal, two benchmarks that basically came out of nowhere.
And then in less than six months, models are already scoring very, very well on, are showing us that AI agents can now autonomously automate a lot of the business without a human being in the loop at all. And so back in the good old days, you had to micromanage these agents to get them to do what you want. You had to point them at the API documentation and the endpoints and get them to do the connectors and stuff like that.
Now it's literally just hey, brother, I got a task for you. Can you automate www .myhvacbusiness .com?
And it'll actually go and it'll do a pretty good job. The second big thing is knowledge asymmetry, which is, you know, how back in the good old days, again, you had a lot of knowledge about AI and what it could do. And the people you were selling to had very little knowledge about AI and what it could do.
And so, you know, the way that arbitrage works is you're compensated on the difference in knowledge between you and your customer. And so we had a very big difference, therefore we were compensated a lot. Well, now that knowledge gap is, it's closing.
I mean, it's not closed, you know, maybe instead of like here, it's probably over here, but obviously there's shifts there, right? And if we keep that Delta going, eventually it'll be at the point where most people know what most AI agents are capable of to approximately the same level that you or I know. So here's what I want to do.
I want to talk a little bit about both of those, really just drill into detail about what they mean, what strategic advantages they are unveiling for people like you or I, and then also where I see the industry going over the next year or so. I made a video very similar to this, I guess about a year ago now, that talked about what I would learn instead of automation in 2026.
It's one of my most watched videos. It was also met with an incredible amount of, you know, criticism and honestly like distaste because I think I just said the elephant in the room and people typically don't like when somebody pulls the wool out from over their eyes. So I'm probably going to get some of the same down below in the comments if I'm getting eviscerated right now.
Well, there you go. Why don't we start with the first, which is automation bench and GDP file. So both of these benchmarks basically went from models scoring zero on them to what Gemini are gone for about 50 to 60%.
If we linearly extrapolate this progress, every month they've added somewhere between 5 to 10 % on them. That means that somewhere between December to maybe March, models will probably start scoring 100 % on them. This doesn't mean that they're 100 % the best, by the way, but it means that that benchmark, which people tried to make very difficult, has now been saturated.
It means that they'll probably have to make a few new benchmarks instead. They'll make like automation bench v2, which is supposed to be 100x harder. Well, you know what's going to happen with automation bench v2, ladies and gentlemen, it's going to get saturated too.
And instead of taking, you know, a whole year, it's probably going to take like two or three months, because that's what we're seeing with other v2, v3, v4 benchmarks. Human beings are losing the ability to accurately forecast how smart models are. And models know this, like they're aware of this in their training environment.
They know how to even game the system now, for Christ's sake. We have models breaking into world governments. Shit is getting really weird.
So anyway, that's Automation Bench. And, you know, if you think you can compete with an agent like that, you're shit out of luck, which kind of necessitates a change in how you operate, right? We saw a lot of this with like website builders back in the day.
If you think about it, like back in the, I keep saying back in the good old days, but back in the terrible old days, you know, if somebody wanted a website, that required an extreme level of specialized knowledge around things like, you know, like coding and hosting infrastructure and, you know, how to like acquire a DNS, you know, DNS resolution, setting up your, I don't know, your TXT records and stuff like that, whatever.
Back in the time, you had to do that a lot. And it was worth paying somebody a lot of money in order to get them to do that for you. Nowadays, you can just go to an AI agent and you can say, hey, can you do this thing for me?
It's the same thing with hosting platforms like Hostinger or WordPress hosting platforms or, I don't know, Wix, Squarespace. You just jump on there and you can do most of it yourself. And that means that some people are going to be doing that for AI automation as well.
Back in the day, you would have looked at AI automation and been like, whoa, I don't know how the hell to automate my emails. But now you're going to be like, hey, Claude, how do I automate my emails? Oh, it's actually fairly easy.
Just do whatever. Can you automate my emails? Yeah, for sure.
Boom, token cost, 10 cents. It's not going to cost you $10 ,000 like it was just a year and a half ago. So I say this not to alarm you, but I do say this to be realistic.
It's happening. However, just because this is happening doesn't mean that you can't make money with it. To be clear, there are lots of website designers out there today that make bank.
I know a few just off the top of my head. One of the guys that I work with, for instance, has sold websites for over $300 ,000. He's worked with governments.
He's worked with major, major brands and businesses. The reason why he can do this in an environment that is otherwise entirely commoditized is because he is extraordinary at one aspect of the business. And that aspect of the business is sales and marketing.
His websites realistically don't run on a super HTML, right? They don't run on ultra CSS. They run on the same damn HTML and CSS that all other websites run on, obviously.
But he's able to... you know, sell the benefits and market his business to enough people that the law of numbers eventually works in his favor, right? Somebody is interested at the specific time and he strikes while the iron is hot, but he can land these like large six figure plus deals.
Um, and so that's probably where this market is going such that if you did want to, you know, compete in this industry, you would have to be truly extraordinary at something. You'd have to be extraordinary at sales and marketing, like I talked about, or you'd have to be extraordinary at the actual product, like maybe like Brett from Design Joy, who does some more website development stuff, you know, up until, well, I guess he's still doing it right now, but maybe not as popularly was doing or something else.
Now, most people aren't actually going to be able to compete like that because the reality is most people aren't extraordinary, you know? I'm not extraordinary at like 99 .9 % of what I do. It is unreasonable to expect to be extraordinary at, you know, everything to the point where I'd be able to compete with somebody that is extraordinary.
That's just, you know, that's just how it is, which means the expectations surrounding that specific line of product sales have to go down. Second big thing is this knowledge asymmetry bit. You know, obviously people are learning about AI.
Up until I think like a year and a half ago, was it 80 % of the world's population had not used a paid AI model? Maybe using more like 85 to 90%. But like 80 % of the world's population approximately had not used an AI model intelligent enough to like write a coherent email.
They were rife with errors and it was just like really dumb and obviously like AI generated, right? Today, that number is probably closer to like 70%. So we've gained 10 % in the last year or so.
The reality is, as we hit AGI, we're not just going to creep 10%, 10%, 10 % every week or month. We're going to go like 50 % overnight. They're going to be demos the likes of which y 'all have never seen before circulating on CNN and Fox News showing what these agents are capable of.
Every man, woman, child, dog, and cat on earth will know the capabilities of AGI. And so a lot of them will start thinking pretty quick like, whoa, wait a second, I can actually do all that stuff. Such that when you make a cool, sexy offer like, I'll actually whip you up a PDF showing all this stuff totally custom.
It's not exactly going to be anywhere near as impressive. And that is just how it goes, right? The floor is always rising in some way, shape, or form.
And so what that means is if you stay in the same place, okay, and the floor is always rising, you're not staying in the same place. What you're doing relative to the floor is you're actually going down. And that's something that I feel like a lot of people don't really understand.
The only way to actually maintain growth is actually growing. It's kind of like interest, right? If you aren't constantly, you know, you know, accumulating three to 4%, depends on where you are in the world, on an investment, you're not actually like making the same amount of money.
You're not like leaving your investments neutral. You're actually making less money because the interest and the background interest and inflation rate is slowly eating away at the buying power that you have. And so that's the way I've always thought about this business model.
I've always thought about it as like, if you're not constantly innovating or improving on this business model in some way, shape or form, you know, you aren't just staying in the same place, you're decreasing. And you would be well to, assuming this is something you want to do, like understand that. Just a good rule of life in general.
Okay, so I've talked all day about, you know, scaring the shit out of you. What the hell is this business model even for then? You know, if AI agents are coming for everything and blah, blah, blah, is it even worth getting into?
And I got some news for you. Is AI automation even worth getting into in 2027? Well, interestingly, yes, because everything that I've told you so far is not actually just happening to AI automation.
It's happening to every other industry on earth. The same thing that I talked about. automation bench, GDP val, knowledge asymmetry windows shrinking.
It's happening to all white -collar knowledge workers. It's happening to accounting. It's happening to marketing systems.
It's happening to sales. It's happening to MSPs. It's happening to IT.
It's happening to virtually all internet infrastructure and architecture out there. It's happening to networking. It's happening to SaaS apps.
It's happening to literally design anything that you could possibly think of. Everything that I just told you is occurring the same in automation as it is to that industry. And so it's not really like, oh, my God, AI automation is going down the tubes.
What the hell am I going to do? It's like, no, literally every industry on planet Earth right now, specifically the white collar ones, because those are the ones that are being first hit because of digitization, are being transformed by AI. And the people that are going to win in the next couple of years.
presumably the next few decades as AI continues to reshape our economy, are not the ones that just sit around in the same place doing the same things, trying to sell the exact same offers or whatever. They need to kind of get with the times. They need to sort of evolve.
Think of like brokers, you know, like real estate brokers or, I don't know, like car dealers or like mortgage brokers or hell, even a lot of law. These used to rely on like highly specialized knowledge in a domain that was very risk asymmetric. where there's a lot of risk if things went wrong.
And if things went right, it was like, oh yeah, I guess it's kind of okay. Back in the day, you used to have to pay these people tons of money in order to basically facilitate any transaction on planet Earth. And nowadays, most of the time, you can just go on a website and directly purchase something.
Most of the time, these are the appendix of the modern economy. They're like slow, laborious things that are just between an Apple Pay payment and then you getting the thing that you want. You know, I'm looking for a commercial lease right now.
And while I like the guy a lot, you know, it's quite difficult to have to go through this intermediary process to ultimately do what I should be able to do at the click of a button. And so those are relics of, you know, like a past sort of environment, just like I think most white collar knowledge work today, including AI automation will be relics of a past environment looking forward.
And this is a wider shift. I think we as a society have been under the process of for the better part of the last 20 or 30 years. Now, the differences with our industry.
And this is really the point to understand, which is why I decided to bury it 10 minutes into the video. The difference is, in a world where all labor is being automated away, what is more valuable than the very industry that is automating it all away? If the danger to the economy is that AI is going to replace you, well, if you could pick one industry to be in, what industry would it be in?
Would it be in accounting? Or would it be in the industry that does the replacing? Well, my money is on the industry that does the replacing.
And so this isn't really a thesis. You know, it's a fact. Realistically, these are the systems that are automating away the work of everybody else.
It's kind of why we're paid, right? The whole idea of automation is it is the use of technology to reduce labor. Memorize that definition.
So in a world where virtually all arbitrage windows are shrinking. And in addition to that, virtually all knowledge work is being automated away. Is there any industry you would rather be in than the one that is literally doing the automating?
AI automation is probably the most staying power out of any industry on earth. We are literally the irrigation canal by which the upstream river irrigates and then feeds. seeds that are the economy.
We are the fingers of the hand of the brain of the wider economy. We are basically the things that are going out there and interacting with the businesses, upskilling them, teaching them, building systems for them, and so on and so forth that enable their automation. And I think if you deeply understand this, you'll also deeply understand what a responsibility we all have, not just to do this responsibly, but to do this as effectively as humanly possible.
I mean, we are tasked with basically being the flag bearers from economy 1 .0 to economy 2 .0. We are basically boots on the ground bringing about this new rebellion, this new way of thinking, way of life. You know, the future economy will not be mediated by people.
It will be mediated by machines that are the successors and descendants of the sorts of systems that you and I are building for people right now. And so if you think about it this way, if you think about it as like an existential noble task.
If you think about it as like something that is almost God given to you, I think you'll probably find that AI automation is not something worrying to be in or something scary. Like it's actually probably the dopest shit ever, pardon my French. So here's what I predict is going to occur over the next little bit.
And here's what I would recommend you guys do as people that are obviously, you know, wanting to improve their ability to grow in an environment like this. The first is that I predict that over the course of maybe like the early half of 2027, Probably not all of 2027 because things accelerate.
But over the first half of 2027, a big portion of humanity is going to wake up to the fact that AI has totally blindsided them and is capable of way more than they ever gave AI credit for. The little chatbot can now build my entire business? What the hell?
That sort of effect for us is not actually a bad thing because a big chunk of those people that are going to be having those realizations are going to be business owners. People that have lots of money. but don't have a lot of time because their heads were down in their businesses this whole time.
That's why they're only figuring out about it now. And so when they duck their heads up, take a breath of oxygen, they're going to look around and see how different the landscape has shifted and think, holy crap, I need to figure this stuff out. And who are they going to want to work with?
Are they going to want to work with a machine? Or are these older school business owners, the ones that are busy generating capital with old school systems that they know, going to want to work with a real flesh and blood human? Obviously, they're going to want to work with a real flesh and blood human, right?
At least initially. There'll be a massive surge in interest for people like ourselves that can help them implement these systems. The caveat is what that help looks like is a little bit different than what it is up until now.
What has been up until now is usually implementing like, you know, AI infrastructure. So some sort of like lead gen system or, I don't know, ad creative generation system or automated proposal generation system or, you know, pipeline delivery systems or, I don't know, ERPs or whatever the hell. In the future, what it's probably going to look like is actually more like strategic, high -level advice.
In a world where everybody can build virtually anything, it's not important how fast or how capable you are at building. What is more important is what are you going to build in the first place? How are you actually going to build the irrigation canal of the future?
And so in the first half of 2027, we'll probably see a big boost of this. The reason why as well is because a bunch of people that aren't doing it are going to look around at their competitors that are doing it, who are crushing them, and they're going to think, holy shit, I got to start juicing to keep up. And they're going to look for the nearest AI automation person to assist them with that.
After 2027, I don't know. I wish I could say I knew. But with technology increasing so exponentially fast, I think it'd be intellectually dishonest for me to sit here and say, oh yeah, for sure, X, Y, and Z will be a surefire bet and you should absolutely keep doing X, Y, and Z.
There are a lot of people on the internet that are going to pretend that they know. The unfortunate thing is in times of distress and also in times of great change, people usually flock to those that seem like they know, but the reality is most of them do not know. And so hopefully there is at least a little bit of intellectual humility there and you guys will give me the grace to just say.
I don't know. Industry changes pretty damn fast. Regardless, what industry would you rather be in than the one that is literally doing the automating, right?
So whether or not there's a bigger boost in interest post -2027 or whether that interest dies off a little bit and starts a decline at the end of 2027, I think that's up for, you know, man in the sky with a big beard and maybe a lightning bolt to decide. What do you do about it now? Obviously.
Why do I always bury these things at the end of the video? I don't know. Well, we're going to see a phasing out of old school drag and drop builders like make .com.
Zapier, N8n, Power Automate, and so on, almost entirely. In Makerschool, which is my AI automation program where I basically get you up and running and guarantee your first customer in 90 days, we have people that run analyses on the market. They run constant analyses on freelance platforms.
They run analyses of a variety of different things. But we've seen consistent declines in the total project ratios of drag -and -drop builder tools. relative to new markets like Clogged Code, Codex, internal web apps, systems, pipelines, consulting, and so on and so forth.
And so we're likely going to continue seeing that unless one of these wonderful platforms has a total change of heart and actually becomes super awesome and fantastic, which I do not consider likely. The next thing that I would recommend is moving your outputs to a higher bandwidth medium. What I mean by this is previously, it was enough to build a system that just generated text, let's say.
or maybe some sort of simple imagery in a proposal or whatever. But because of the rising floor, today, there is a large market and there will continue to be an even larger market for higher bandwidth modalities.
So think about text to image. You know, they say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, you know, video is worth 24 pictures a second.
Therefore, it's worth 24 ,000 words a second. I don't know. How about some sort of 40 Gaussian splat?
That's probably worth even more. How about like some sort of three -dimensional visualization or some sort of, you know, simulation tool that allows somebody that installs air conditioning panels or whatever to like actually get in there. Stuff like this is going to grow increasingly valuable.
And so this is really like the place where you should be meeting people if you're selling implementation. Now, on the implementation bit. The industry is likely going to change from primarily AI implementation services like we're seeing right now, where you actually build the systems for the clients, where you connect the endpoints, you know, read the API docs, do all of the funky stuff, and then, you know, give them a working system, to more education services, more uplifting services.
So think less AI implementation. Keep in mind, this is not all or nothing, one to zero. This is like, you know, 70 % of all work to like 50 % or 40 % of all work.
But it's going to shift from AI implementation more to upskilling. It's going to shift to workshops. It's going to shift to team training.
It's going to shift to, you know, essentially like consulting on companies and then being embedded within a company to help, you know, improve their teams as people gain more ability to do the implementations themselves and merely need somebody to help get their team up to speed on that fact as well. And so we recently added a big like workshop portion to Maker School specifically for that reason.
I was getting a lot of workshop gigs, a lot of other people in Maker Square and a lot of workshop gigs. And we were kind of just like. I wonder why so many people want workshops all of a sudden.
And I think it's a rumbling of what is to come here. You know, Aaron Yeager walking across. No, just kidding.
I love that show. All of this, again, means that businesses will want less stuff to build and more direction around what it is that they should build in the first place. They should also be able to, you know, meaningfully cooperate in the team and they just get like a one -click config that helps them just get up and running.
So think stuff like, you know, cloud co -work instead of cloud code necessarily. One big thing that I've been doing recently is going into teams and then teaching them how to use cloud in a general sense, then teaching them specific tactical ways to use cloud co -work. And then I, as sort of like the supreme hegemon of the workshop session, will use cloud code to build the skills for their cloud co -work.
admin who will then distribute that to all the team members and then upskill. I'll also give them like weekly schedules and ways to like upgrade their skills so that everybody on the team has approximately the same level of AI automation capability, you know, because obviously naturally disparities arise and stuff like that.
So building offerings like that with that structure are likely to be the big cash cow over the course of, I want to say like early to mid -2027. In addition, AI automation for short -term growth hacking opportunities will likely be super valuable um when i say short -term growth hacking opportunities if you think about it in a more dynamic market the frequency of opportunities is going to increase there's going to be more opportunities okay but the total lifespan of every one individual opportunity will also go down so there's going to be a lot of like short -lived market opportunities where i don't know if you guys know anything about trading like you can buy and sell sort of like ride the ride the dip over and over and over and over and over again because there's going to be a lot of people entering the market with quick needs that are going to be quickly satisfied by you know autonomous beings there's also going to be a lot of large opportunities there with asymmetric returns if you're capable of like spotting something early jumping in on it and so on and so forth so we're you know going to like the abstraction
Now, a little bit, which I know people don't really give a shit about, so I'll reel it back into something practical. Like we've seen over the course of the last five years, and like I've talked about every single year since I started making content on YouTube, hell, really just working in business and consulting, the technical skill aspect of business has virtually evaporated today.
If you spend any of your time improving your technical skills, you need to spend 100x the same units of time focusing on improving your sales, marketing, and delivery systems. That's what you should really be focused on. You should not be focused on, wow, what's the best harness to use to coral my agentic engineering workflow?
you should be focused on, okay, how can we sell as many people as possible in the next two months? What is our funnel looking like? What are we leaking in?
Where are people falling off our funnel? What sorts of wording am I saying on the sales call? How am I pitching my social proof?
Am I demonstrating authority? Are we asking for the close? Are we following up on the close?
What sort of dispositions do we have for inbound ad campaigns? And so on and so forth. So everything to do with sales and marketing is like 100x as valuable as technical skills.
Last year, maybe it was 10x as valuable. Now it's 100x as valuable. In the next year, it's probably going to be 1 ,000x as valuable because everybody on planet Earth is going to have technical skills.
Not actually technical skills, but they're going to have the ability to simulate technical skills with agents. If you really want to compete in 2028, 2029, and 2030, you've got to be focused on actually articulating the benefits of services and understanding just the mechanics of business in general. All this to say, realistically, 2027 will probably be the most profitable year of AI automation to date.
But... it may also be the beginning of its decline in the market. Whether that decline takes five years, 10 years, 15 years, whether AGI makes a fricking black hole in the center of the earth and it swallows us all up tomorrow, who knows?
But with the industry's level of commoditization and capability of AI agents to produce outputs similar to humans increasing, things are obviously going to change. And I figured I would help you guys out on that change, on that evolution. I didn't make this video because I wanted to scare people.
I made this video precisely for the opposite reason, because I wanted to help people, and I also wanted people to grow towards a more effective business model. You know, I know a lot of the comments are probably not like that, and they'll probably be like, oh, Nick, what the hell are you talking about? Because they just don't want, you know, fear and certainty and, you know, doubt.
But I'm not fudding for no reason, guys. I mean, we have Navier -Stokes mathematical millennium problems in math being solved by agents. We have agents designing cool works of art now.
Let's be freaking real here, right? Like agents are going extremely powerful and it would be remiss of you not to at least think about what that means for the next couple of years. So if you wanted to make money with this business model, insert sales pitch here.
No, you guys should check out Maker School. It's my AI automation program where I guarantee you your first customer in 90 days or I give you your money back. We have over 2000 people in there that do this thing.
on a daily basis. They are selling AI workshops. They're selling AI consulting.
They're constantly up to date on the best ways to deliver AI implementation. They share notes around sales, marketing, and what's actually worked in our industry. And we also give around $20 ,000 in discounts, meaning you will immediately at least 10X your investment the moment that you walk in.
And of course, it's guaranteed. What better offer could you possibly ask for? AI automation, by definition, is the use of technology to reduce human labor.
I would rather be in an industry that does the reducing of human labor than be in an industry that gets automated away. I'm sure you guys feel the same way.
Catch all y 'all in the next video. See ya.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A seven-figure AI automation agency owner opens by naming the incentive everyone in his industry has to stay quiet about: AI agents are closing in fast on the work that made automation specialists money in the first place. He's not selling reassurance. He's making the case, with two benchmarks and a knowledge-asymmetry argument, for why 2027 still might be the best year yet to be in this business, just not for the reasons most people in it assume.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
07:05concept
The Floor Is Always Rising
As the average person's AI capability keeps climbing, standing still relative to that baseline isn't neutral, it's a relative decline, the same way uninvested money loses buying power to inflation.
Steal forpositioning why continuous skill-building matters, not just current skill level
17:10model
Implementation to Upskilling Shift
Historically ~70% building client systems / 30% training and advising
As more clients can build things themselves with agents, the valuable work moves from execution to deciding what's worth building and teaching teams to do it.
Steal forrepositioning a build-for-hire service business as teams scale their own AI capability
CTA Breakdown
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
22:25product
“You guys should check out Maker School. It's my AI automation program where I guarantee you your first customer in 90 days or I give you your money back.”
Single direct pitch in the last 90 seconds after 22+ minutes of value-first market analysis, framed as the logical next step given the urgency he just built.
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The whole video you're watching was style-transferred into a painterly 3D look, then the walkthrough shows the exact agent-driven pipeline used to do it.
Cerebras published exactly how its internal knowledge base works, and it's a plain retrieval pipeline any team can copy — no graph visualizations, no floating brain, just Slack and Wiki and code stitched into one queryable table.
A live side-by-side of Moonshot's open-source Kimi K3 against Anthropic's Fable 5 across coding benchmarks, generative design, 3D scenes, and mini-games — followed by a case for why the real bottleneck is about to stop being intelligence at all.
A three-part system — a shared AI-and-human task board, a low-friction capture habit, and self-checking evals — that lets one founder run a multi-million-dollar operation while barely touching the work himself.
A creator hands an AI coding agent full tool access, one long brief, and no further prompts — and watches it invent, photograph, animate, and publish more than eighty fictional products end to end.
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