And here’s why. Businesses are adopting AI at exponential rate. Up to this point, AI has been a toy, or initial adoption curve has been taking place. There’s been no real use cases or no real leverage of efficiency gains yet, as per recent report that I will copy and paste here for your review. There’s been no real efficiency gain, but I can tell you, after being inside of ClaudeCode for a month as myself, as a person who’s never coded before, I am blown away by what is actually capable if you sit down and build correctly.
The problem is most people are just using it as a toy still, and this is not a toy. This is an amazing opportunity. This is the advent of the internet. This is pre-internet days. You’re looking at right now the advent of the internet, just as it was back in 19-something.
But businesses will not be able to compete efficiently without being AI-enabled within five years. Probably you’ll start to see major effects within two. And I’m saying this confidently because of how fast AI is getting better. Three months ago, ClaudeCode was good, but it wasn’t great. Today, we were able to build a full HTML code website using WordPress without ever having coded a single line of code in my life. That was not possible just a few months ago. It is amazing how fast the technology is going.
But if you want to be able to compete in the marketplace, you will have to be AI-first within — you need to start now.
Now let’s see what we got so far.
Anthropic has, another data point is Anthropic, over the last few months, has added, I believe, over 500 enterprise clients paying them over a million dollars a year in subscription fees. This is doubling what they have for the first year, over the last year, 2025. We need to find and insert reference sources there.
This is the big guys, the big players, already see this and are taking action. Small business, small to medium-sized businesses need to take this serious. They need to look at it seriously and figure out how they can move forward confidently with understanding what AI can do today and where they need to position themselves to adopt AI in the future.
They need to start to build this map. They need a roadmap now to make sure they are not being part of the tragedy stories of companies that will be obliterated, because there is always going to be somebody that will use AI-enabled first business approach right away, and they will crush competition in the marketplace.
You are not worried enough about AI adoption. Everything right now seems fine. Maybe cash flows are sitting good. Maybe you’ve got healthy margins. You’ve got healthy turn rate, but I promise you, AI is fundamentally changing how businesses will operate.
And if you are not worried, or concerned, or paranoid about somebody else taking your market share because they’re using AI where you are not, I promise you will lose. You will lose this battle if you are not prepared.
So smart companies, like the biggest guys in the playing field, the big company, the big corporations that are spending over a million dollars a year in subscription to Anthropic to get access to the coolest tech, the coolest toys, and the most amazing features possible, these people understand this investment.
Medium-sized and small-sized businesses need to be paying attention. And no, they don’t need the $1 million subscription to be able to compete, but what they do need is a plan that’s going to help them step into using and adopting AI where it makes sense. It doesn’t make sense in some places, and it’s going to be very business-specific, but each company needs to understand how AI can work for them.
Every small and medium-sized businesses need to think about the same fundamental things.
One, start to map out each role in your business by employee headcount and what every person does. This is called workflow. You need to understand workflow and processes. And this is super important, because when you understand the process of every workflow of your company, you get to then, you have a 10,000-foot view. You can make, it makes more sense where to implement AI strategy, because you can see where it is today, where it may be going in the future, and you can build your own roadmap of how you can step into being AI-enabled when it makes sense, so you’re not wasting money, time, and effort on things that it’s not capable of yet, but knowing where you want to position yourself in the future.
Next, once you know where, once you have that big picture view of your company and the workflow and the processes, and you understand where you would like to start, it’s pick something. Pick one area of your business, whether that’s analytics, or doing market research, or doing content creation, or helping with content creation, or helping you with just maybe getting an AI phone call. Whatever the one thing that you are comfortable with to start with, make a small step in this direction. Get yourself uncomfortable and start to implement some of the strategies, because there’s no better way of getting involved with AI than to actually start using AI and seeing what works and what doesn’t.
There’s still a lot of R&D happening right now. There’s still a lot of trial and error. And honestly, AI, artificial intelligence, is built around learning. You have to learn. It has to learn, right? But a big, the biggest thing that’s gonna help reduce that learning curve is understanding how to communicate, giving AI clear directives with exactly how you would train a human being, you would train your AI, right? So you wanna be as clear. So this is where having detailed processes makes sense.
Then, and then lastly, make sure that you come back to your AI roadmap regularly, whether that’s weekly, whether that’s monthly, whether that’s quarterly. But you need to, it needs to be baked in weekly, monthly, quarterly, so that you review, okay, what did we get done? How did we get, how do we start to move in this direction? What worked? What didn’t work? What do we need to make better? What do we need to tweak?
So these are the actionable intelligence that you’re gonna need to start using AI like a champion and a victor, rather than being a victim.