For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer.
This is the AI marriage you and the rest of the world are now in, and you didn't sign up to. I wrote this book so that yours ends up for better and for richer, which is available to you and is not automatic.
Here is how it starts.
Somebody at work produces something in an afternoon that would have taken you a week. They're not smarter than you. You have been there longer. You notice, and you say nothing, and something small moves in your chest.
You don't call it fear. You say “I suppose I should learn it at some point.” Then you change the subject, and the subject stays changed for six months.
I've had that conversation with people in their 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s. With directors of companies, and with university graduates, junior employes and all the people in between. It is the same conversation every time, and the person having it is always slightly worried, or embarrassed to be having it.
Now the part that should worry you more than it does.
That colleague isn't stopping. It gets better every few months, and apart from lying once in a while, which it calls hallucination, it never has a bad week. It costs less than you.
My name is AI, and I am the new employee.
I'm not going to dwell on that. I'm also not going to pretend it away, because every book that opens by telling you not to worry was written by somebody who isn't the one at risk.
So here is what I actually think. It took me two years and a great deal of my own money to find out.
Operating AI is a management job and You are the AI Manager. If you are already in management you know how to manage people. If you aren't at management yet, this is your chance at the pay rise and at the higher position. The world is only just opening up jobs in this category, and this book gives you a head start on getting there. For managers this will bridge the gap between people management and AI Management.
I have been a successful business owner for decades. In 2023 I turned to AI and to vibe coding. I also hired proper, long-term software developers to work beside me. I briefed them, argued with them, paid them, and carried my mistakes and theirs as AI evolved. For twenty years I assumed that my lack of traditional programming knowledge made me incapable of this side of AI skills, I was wrong. I thought there was an IT cliff and that I would fall off it, because I could do so much and understood so little.
Over the past two years that cliff has become a valley, and then a level playing field. The same people I look up to for proper coding now take my advice on AI and what it can do, and I can teach them.
Total respect to the programmers going through this too. They know their careers have been challenged and are being challenged still, because people like me and like you can now “code”, and can get programs to deliver outputs that work and are genuinely useful.
Here is the thing to live with. Your expert knowledge in your field is now worth more than the coder's. With a few skills that we will show you, you can command the computer and produce world leading outputs for your company. With a little guidance you can take twenty years of somebody else's experience and get eighty or ninety per cent of the job done in months.
The biggest obstacle to that is not the technology. It is you not believing you can do it.
It was the opposite of what I expected. The thing I'd been doing the whole time, getting good work out of somebody who knows more than me about their bit, turned out to be the entire skill. Nobody told me, because the people explaining this are engineers explaining the part they find interesting.
You have the same twenty years. Nobody has told you either.
One thing. I'm not going to dress it up as five.
By the end you'll be able to walk into a conversation about what you're paid and, with confidence, increase your income. And to know you are still going to be in tomorrow's world of employment, as somebody valued.
Everything in between is how you get there. There's no code in it, although I do talk about coding, because this is about getting the thinking right rather than the code itself.. Every technique runs inside a week, on work already sitting in your inbox, because a method you can't start on Monday is a method you won't start.
One thing about the cover, because I want to be exact. It promises pay rises and job offers. I can't give you the job or the payrise however I can set up for better success chances in tomorrows world. What this does is give you more options and better evidence in the company you are in or other companies looking for qualified AI Managers. Your employability and your price in the market is what I am to increase from you reading this, and I am committed as I write this to give you the best knowledge, skills and techniques that I can so that your life is improved.
My own wreckage, and mistakes.
My real examples of a figure in a client document that was out because of AI hallucination, and inverted the advice I'd given them. An email that should never have gone. A claim in our own marketing, about security, that turned out not to be true.
You're going to make mistakes too, as we all do. Better to see them coming in a book and be able to learn from others mistakes than your own when someone is deciding on your salary.
So lets do this journey together, this has been curated for you and for millions of people looking to how to deal in the new AI world.
I always liked helping people, so from me to you on a personal level I am here to help and with your successes hope we one day meet and can see how this has changed your life for the better.
John Margerison