The AI Workflow That Puts You in the Top 1% | Practical Steps to Level Up

Just this morning, I used AI to write an email, to make an investment of Perplexity's research, and to pull all my numbers into one dashboard. It's just

a typical thing that I do every morning.

It's interesting how a lot of people started using AI, but only 15% of reported CEOs, for example, are getting real value out of it. And the ones who do get value out of it spend at least 8

hours a week building their own AI skills. You actually have to put some

skills. You actually have to put some work into it. There was a new research that came out a few days ago from 22,500 American employees. 52% now use AI at

American employees. 52% now use AI at work. 15% use it daily. And people using

work. 15% use it daily. And people using AI for one or two tasks, 45% report a real productivity gain. Seven or more tasks, 90% and they're using the same

tools. They just hand over more kinds of

tools. They just hand over more kinds of work. But that means putting more hours

work. But that means putting more hours into understanding how that works. 58%

of companies in the US now require employees to use AI. Some are folding it into performance reviews trying to measure how much value AI actually added. But without real onboarding or

added. But without real onboarding or real clear use cases that turns just into a checkbox and people open a tool, poke around, get overwhelmed, never

figure out why they needed it in the first place and start and they do not feel happy about it. If you have the same feelings, please stick around. I'm

going to show you which tools people actually keep using and how they've been using them for many, many weeks to optimize their work. And if you're just a beginner, I'm also going to show you exactly where to start to feel the magic

of AI. And in this video, we have

of AI. And in this video, we have insights from six leaders with decades of experience. And by the end of this

of experience. And by the end of this video, you'll know the strategies that separate successful AI users from people who are still struggling to understand how to optimize their work. Let's go.

I'm going to start with the clearest productivity use case I've ever seen. I

was talking to Lana Lopez who co-founded Kulshi, a prediction market valued at more than a billion dollars and her entire business depends on collecting information quickly and turning it into decisions. So she's running a fast

decisions. So she's running a fast growing team which means every week she has to understand what changed across the company, what is falling behind, what needs her attention, who promised

what, who didn't do something and asked her how does she do that? And she told me something I really want to build for myself. So she actually had engineers to

myself. So she actually had engineers to build that. But just listen to it. To me

build that. But just listen to it. To me

it sounds like magic.

Well, one thing that I think is useful for a lot more people maybe is on kind of like weekly planning and kind of like state of things. Um that I think it's like how do we get updates from the

entire company track from what the updates were from the week before flag in terms of that like it's connected to everything that we do emails docs all of that. We actually have an AI team now

that. We actually have an AI team now that is actually building. We obviously

have a very very good like engineering side of the of the AI equation is very good but we're trying to build kind of like every new employee should get an agent that's kind of like the biggest problem we have there that we're trying to figure out is how to figure out uh

like permissions in the right way. We

need to make sure that for example we have a lot of legal work or like surveillance and all of that that it has to be very you know just some people have it and how do we think about it uh that way but I would say that like

planning organizing and collecting information. Sundays are very like heavy

information. Sundays are very like heavy days for me because it's like when I stop and I look at the entire week, everyone what they was done, what we need to do the next week, look at all the metrics and all that. It's all I do on Sunday. And now I'm actually able to

on Sunday. And now I'm actually able to like have brunch on Sunday because I'm like I I I have a lot more time uh to think about things. But um because a lot of it is kind of done in the in the way that I expect. But I would say is like

like really looking at like for the past x number of weeks this person has overpromised, underd delivered. these

are the things like these metrics are not I'm trying to build something for my like that for myself but what I realized we need to hire someone so we try to build internally and my team is like creative producers and now we hired

someone with an engineering background and this is what we are aiming for in our company ideally when it comes to your work AI has to know everything that's happening your processes because

it has to be connected everywhere and has the context on what's going on so you don't have to feed it with anything this is something we're still building work in progress but we're very close to it one of the updates. I think I'm going

to make a separate video on it. By the

way, let me know in the comments if you want it, but we now have a bot in every company chat and I can ask this bot how many times I pulled back on decisions from this person or how many times I

asked to reexlain something and then it gives me a summary of conversations that I had. So, it it's easier for me to make

I had. So, it it's easier for me to make decisions. And that's one of the steps

decisions. And that's one of the steps towards my perfect AI system. Now, let's

move on to the next use case. Eric runs

the digital economy lab at Stanford. He

studies what AI does to work and wages.

And I asked him what AI is worth to him personally in dollars. Normally people

from universities refuse to answer that question, but he gave me a number.

What's the number for you? How much

would you pay to never to not touch AI this month?

Oh my god, it almost I mean for me it's it's tens of thousands, you know, somebody because I I it's my life. Like

it's it's I use it every day. I use it every night until too late at night. You

know, I'm working with Claude Co-work and and testing out different research ideas.

Uh I use it for fun when I plan things.

Anytime I land in a new city, I have it give me advice on which restaurants to go to. Uh it's just so integrated into

go to. Uh it's just so integrated into my life, it would be like uh tearing off my left arm.

Is is there a use case that can be very inspiring for people who haven't tried using AI deeply enough if they only use it like search?

Here's a kind of meta way of doing it.

sit down with it and ask it how I can use it in my life.

But if they haven't used it enough, I don't think there's like enough.

No, no, no, no. You have you have you have the conversation. So what you do is you is you ask chat GPT or Claude say hey tell me how you can be useful to me and ask me questions. You can literally

say keep asking me questions interview me and it'll say okay you know what's your job? You know do you have kids? You

your job? You know do you have kids? You

know whatever. Um what are some of the problems you worried about on last week?

and it'll have a conversation with you and then I've done this by the way.

It'll come up with like 10 recommended things that you can be using it for.

What would you never delegate to AI?

What would I never delegate to AI? Um

there's nothing like that anymore.

I know something pops in my head. I say

no, I could see doing that. You know,

delegate entirely. You know, there are some really like life or death decisions. I I I use it before I go to

decisions. I I I use it before I go to the doctor and it gives me some um thing questions to ask, but at the end of the day, I still want to have a real human make the call and you know that they're

just not good enough that they have the issues. Um and um I think it's it's

issues. Um and um I think it's it's usually a partnership like so I almost never 100% delegate something to AI. it.

For me, it's always co-working and collaboration where I'll interact with the AI and it will give me some ideas and then I'll overrule some and I'll agree with some and it's kind of a a partner.

Eric just made a bet that the real payoff from AI shows up in the next 2 3 years and it goes to whoever actually puts it to work. And that's actually a perfect place to pause for a second.

Lately, I care less about which model is best and more about turning AI into a system that actually helps me run the business. So, I've been testing Denspark

business. So, I've been testing Denspark with exactly that in mind. Every model

is already inside it. GPT, Claw, Gemini, plus the image and video ones like Nana, Banana, VO, and Cling. So, I'm not picking favorites or paying for five

different subscriptions. Genpark crossed

different subscriptions. Genpark crossed 250 million in annual recurring revenue in 12 months. And honestly, the models are just the starting point. The real

value is what you build on top of them.

Take a simple example. My team lives in spreadsheets. So I opened AI sheets and

spreadsheets. So I opened AI sheets and typed rank my last 30 Silicon Valley Girl episodes by views. Tag each one by topic and tell me which three topics

outperform. A few seconds later, I had

outperform. A few seconds later, I had every episode ranked, sorted by topic, and three clear winners to make more of.

That's exactly what Eric's betting on.

put AI to work on real decisions and act on them. That's where it turned into a

on them. That's where it turned into a system. I run that breakdown every week.

system. I run that breakdown every week.

So instead of retyping the prompt, I saved it as a skill. Now it's a reusable tool my whole team runs with one click and nobody ever rebuilt it from scratch.

The piece that I really like as a founder is agentbased. Instead of a chatbot that you open and close, it's a workspace where AI agents run right alongside your projects, your meetings,

and your connected apps doing the work in the background. It feels less like an AI tool and more like an operating system for your business. And there is also design. I took our current futurep

also design. I took our current futurep proof newsletter logo and turned it into a banner in a few clicks. None of this replaces anyone on my team, but what it does, it takes the repetitive work off

our plate so we get our hours back for the parts that matter. I'm still finding new workflows to turn into skills. So,

if you try just one thing, make it this.

Pick one task you repeat every week and turn it into a skill. And if you're new, you can trial Pro Tier deep research or creating a spreadsheet through the get started bonus. The link is in the

started bonus. The link is in the description. Eric's research cycle used

description. Eric's research cycle used to take weeks. Now, it's a 5-minute back and forth, but he still won't hand AI the final call on anything that matters.

And this is something I want you to remember. Never ever let AI make your

remember. Never ever let AI make your strategic decisions. AI is your analyst,

strategic decisions. AI is your analyst, your researcher, whoever, but um not a strategy person. One of my favorite

strategy person. One of my favorite things to ask AI, how can I improve this? So, for example, we built a skill

this? So, for example, we built a skill for a team that scans our recurring work patterns and asks the same question.

What else can we improve in our workflow? What routine work keeps

workflow? What routine work keeps repeating that we can automate? Peter

Yang wrote this down in our interview on skills that you can set up yourself and set up this recursive learning thing. A

year ago, Peter was drowning in meetings and paperwork. Then he rebuilt his

and paperwork. Then he rebuilt his entire workflow around AI. He left

product roles at Meta, Reddit, and Roblox to go solo. And now he runs a media empire and has built 16 apps without writing a line of code. So

basically close the loop. when I was interviewing him, uh, the famous tweet by Boris Churnney came out that he doesn't prompt his AI anymore. It just

prompts itself and improves itself. So,

I had to dig deeper because Peter built something like that for himself.

And yeah, I have skills for making my podcast, for editing my newsletter post and so on. Most basic way to do a self-improvement is after you use a skill and you have a back and forth conversation with the AI because it never gets it right in one shot. Then

you just say like, hey, based on our conversation, can you please update the scale to account for, you know, to try to get to it in one shot faster, right?

And it'll make a bunch of changes and you should review it. So I I can talk about my creator work since we're both creators. And uh, you know, being a

creators. And uh, you know, being a creator is like a lot of repetitive work, right? Like a lot of repetitive

work, right? Like a lot of repetitive copy and pasting back and forth and like changing things from like a newsletter post to like uh like you YouTube description to like social post. It was

like a lot of kind of like different formats. And I I I just decided to spend

formats. And I I I just decided to spend one day like just like you know no meetings and just sat down with Codex and be like hey I I basically just brain dumped all my workflows to codeex and here's how I do it manually and I use

this thing called whisper flow just like bringing dump right through my voice. So

there's like a couple major ones like uh you know prepping the podcast post-production. There's editing my

post-production. There's editing my newsletter posts. There's posting to the

newsletter posts. There's posting to the various social media platforms. And then another one is just like setting up a visor to kind of give me like business advice like checking ideas.

It's just like a scale that's linked to a Google doc file that has like a bunch of personal information about my business and then it kind of gives me advice.

Every week it sends me a brief about how much money I made this week and and and also like um how did my past 30 days content perform?

Mhm.

And also like all the other channels that make similar content. Is there any kind of outliers?

Mhm.

You know, so uh and it does that for YouTube and also for Substack.

Mhm.

And and for Substack, it doesn't have API, so it has to use browser use to look up everything.

Yeah.

So that would take me like an hour to do manually, but like it it does it. I

think one of the most useful skills that I built is just like a personal advisor skill because uh I guess um my wife is tired of me asking for advice all all the time. It literally is just a text

the time. It literally is just a text file, right? So it's a text file to give

file, right? So it's a text file to give me honest advice and you know you're my trusted life and business advice and then keep your tone warm to stay ahead.

Get the $20 chat GPD plan download and just start saving time and uh you building workflows and building skills to save time and asking coders to do it.

So, Peter's system is a stack of skills plus a memory file he writes himself. He

keeps repeating one rule. AI gets him to 90%. The last 10% is his. If you want

90%. The last 10% is his. If you want more tools like this, check out the full episode. But getting to 90% is pretty

episode. But getting to 90% is pretty impressive. We pass through the same

impressive. We pass through the same nine steps. We do guest scoring, we do

nine steps. We do guest scoring, we do packaging, we do guest dossier, briefing teaser distribution tracking, and we wrote down every one of those repeating processes and built a

skill library out of them. So, every

process is documented in a skill. Every

skill started as a mess of existing materials, our SOPs, 40 plus full episode transcripts, and we had a performance tracker. And it's one of the

performance tracker. And it's one of the best decisions I've made for this team.

By the way, if you want to stay updated and on all the things this amazing people say in my podcast, we put a lot of prompts and use cases from these interviews into my newsletter, Future Proof, plus how I'm actually using

stuff. This week we posted about how I

stuff. This week we posted about how I use Perplexity and you guys and your knowledge in the comments to come up with an action plan to work on my high cholesterol levels. So, uh, subscribe

cholesterol levels. So, uh, subscribe and enjoy. Once you subscribe to the

and enjoy. Once you subscribe to the newsletter, you will be able to click on our previous newsletters to see what's going on. The next person I want to

going on. The next person I want to highlight is Aaron Levy. He runs Box, a $4 billion company. And I asked him to show me his AI setup. and I expected something really really complicated

because you know he's been in Silicon Valley for years. He runs a publicly traded company. He has his problems by

traded company. He has his problems by hand and they are long. Can you

recommend top three apps that people should be using?

Um you know I mean it probably won't be much of a surprise. I would I would download Codeex. I would download Cloud.

download Codeex. I would download Cloud.

uh even for nontechnical people 100% well especi partly is is because codeex is becoming more uh inclined uh toward knowledge work use cases

and what should they be doing with it like automate a process within their automate a process give it just like crazy problems and see what happens like uh go do this research in this market um you know wire up multiple MCP servers to

data sources you have um so you understand kind of how does it work like how is it querying that that other system how does it how is it accessing my email like like Oh, scary. Oh, no,

actually, I understand it now. Like,

like get get a sense of how that all kind of is working together. So, I think just any one of the top AI tools for productivity, maybe for coding, uh, is a good way to get started and it'll already get you like 90% of the way there.

So, Codeex, uh, probably Cloud Co-work, Perplexity, like these are some just easy ones to just get started with.

Do you have any examples of workflows that you've automated for yourself and you'll never go back to manual? The kind

of things that I'll never do again is like I'll never do like market research in a traditional way. So I'm often asking an agent to

way. So I'm often asking an agent to like go and analyze, you know, a hundred different companies worth of trends or information. I'll

just never do that again. Like I'll

never go to Google and type each company in and and do the research. Like I'm

going to have an agent go and and fan out, do all of that, and then maybe I'll click like, oh, the underlying sources and verify something or double check something. So, lots of market analysis.

something. So, lots of market analysis.

I'll never I'll never open up code editor and like, you know, type code again. And I wasn't for the past, you

again. And I wasn't for the past, you know, many years anyway. But like the reverse is true, which is now I can actually like get prototypes built when I couldn't have before.

Um, so anything coding related. Even

design is like you just go to chat between you're like, "Hey, I need this idea done. Could you just like make it

idea done. Could you just like make it look like this?" And then it gets you like image the new image rendering model gets you like 75% of the way there. you

hand that off to a real designer and then they kind of do the the full thing.

Um so there's a lot in the ideation, the creative process, the market analysis, customer research, all of those domains that um that I am heavily using AI for.

Is there a certain way you structured memory? Uh like did you because I hear

memory? Uh like did you because I hear some people like upload personal constitution like their principles of work. Is there anything like that that

work. Is there anything like that that you've done?

Um I'm less fancy on that front. Um and

partly because I don't even know what I would write down. um because I'm all over the place. So, uh so I am I don't have a lot of things yet that I would I would know how to really document. It's

more process specific in which case in which case back to this sort of reprompting issue. I'm more just on the

reprompting issue. I'm more just on the fly just giving it pretty clear instructions of exactly what to go do.

So like I feel like I'm a pretty good prompter like like uh so every time it's a long long prompt, right?

Every time it's a long long prompt and I'll store those off in in various places. um uh you know by virtue of box

places. um uh you know by virtue of box like we're like we store lots of data.

So I have lots of documents that have information in them that I'm using you know constantly but it's it's not as as awesome as like a sole file or a or a personal constitution.

I already talked about this. The base

you always have to start with is a few files. Your tone of voice, your business

files. Your tone of voice, your business strategy, your personal goals, your decision rules, and what I call your personal constitution. It's what keeps

personal constitution. It's what keeps AI outputs sounding like you instead of sounding generic. Upload every document

sounding generic. Upload every document tied to your brand and then just let AI do its thing. Now, let's talk about token maxing. That's a very

token maxing. That's a very controversial topic. Let me explain. So,

controversial topic. Let me explain. So,

Salan runs Khan Academy, which serves learners around the world and has around 200 engineers working on products at scale. The organization now spends about

scale. The organization now spends about 1.2 million a year on AI. So, I asked S if he's willing to cut that number down.

He told me he's pushing his engineers to spend more.

Well, I think engineering is where we're seeing it the most and that is where we also and I think you've heard many people say you some of the engineers who are really leaning into this, they're running five, six, seven, eight, nine,

10 agents simultaneously writing code, reviewing code. Um, the anthropic folks

reviewing code. Um, the anthropic folks told us that we were one of the biggest users of actually the agents for reviewing code. Um,

reviewing code. Um, interesting. And you know, we we I I'm

interesting. And you know, we we I I'm getting a little sticker shock for how expensive this stuff is. Our our run rate on on our our anthropic bill is about $1.2 million right now.

Um and it's growing fast.

That's a year or a month.

A year. A year. A year. But it's still a lot for for you know 200 or so engineers. It's mostly engineers. And

engineers. It's mostly engineers. And

we're looking on a daily basis and our CTO was saying, "Yeah, we just saw one of our engineers spent $3,000 in a day."

I think that was the number of compute costs. And I'm like, "Oh my god, what is

costs. And I'm like, "Oh my god, what is I think are you trying to push them to use even more?" Because you see some companies

more?" Because you see some companies that was a question. I was like, "What are they doing?" And then he's like, "Then we talked to them." And they actually in a few hours were able to do something that would have normally taken them three or four months.

It's like, "Okay, that was a great use of $3,000. Go spend more." I think the

of $3,000. Go spend more." I think the rapid prototyping um we we just launched a feature a few months ago that in the old days it would have been like maybe

we can fit it by next school year. And

this is one of the engineers at a hackathon vibe coded it in a day and then on a weekend he said you know he's an engineer so he had the full development environment but he was able

to create working on our real data and it's a very front-end kind of game thing so it didn't have a lot of implications to what might happen to the back end.

He's like I think we could ship this thing and got some designers involved made it made it a little bit nicer and we were able to ship it in about a month. got, you know, we we just

month. got, you know, we we just approved all the connectors with the various AIs. So now our AIs can access

various AIs. So now our AIs can access our Slack and our Gmail and our docs and all of that kind of stuff. And we are learning and encouraging people how to use it, how not to use it. Don't let it

do things without you being in the loop.

Don't let it post on social media. Don't

let it send the email. Maybe let it draft the email and then you you check on it. But I am on a daily basis, you

on it. But I am on a daily basis, you know, I talk to one or more of these uh of these AIs and I say, "What what's falling through the cracks?" And it's acting like a little bit of a chief of staff for me and it's going to my Slack,

it's going to my Gmail, it's going that it's like, "Oh, I've drafted something for you. Is this good?" Something I use

for you. Is this good?" Something I use use the same prompt. I I've I mean, this is just I've replaced what like reading the news and I just have a bunch of threads about the topics I'm interested

in and like at night I'm like, "What's the latest?" Yeah,

the latest?" Yeah, but one thing I found and I think this is important to build AI skills. I've

been fascinated by what's going on in the Middle East and the straight of Hormuz and the game of chicken and the gamesmanship that's going on there and how the market seems to be ignoring it

and ignoring the fact that we have $100 plus oil prices and you know $20 shipping rates. So it's essentially

shipping rates. So it's essentially I just $9 per gallon yesterday in near Atheertton.

Yeah.

What?

Wow. That's they're the for for boating of the future. Um, a lot of the times when I was asking like what about this?

I think this is going to happen and we've all the AI is like S you're a genius. You're spotting what other

genius. You're spotting what other people aren't spotting and it is very seductive cuz sometimes it'll do it very and so I have learned to say be critical

of me like really push back and even then sometimes it won't. I don't know if you should blindly follow this advice just because AI slob is real and if you just push your team members or push

yourself to token max sometimes it's unnecessary cost depending on how many processes you run but asking yourself a question can AI do this and actually trying to do something with AI is a great question to do so don't be blindly

talking maxing set up a rule for yourself and for me I really like a prompt when I ask uh my perplexity computer for example based on my queries for the past two weeks what should I be automating

And it will come with a set of things I should try and automate. Sometimes they

don't work. Sometimes they're just not automatable. Like researching what's

automatable. Like researching what's going on in my niche and coming up with scripts. I don't know. It will come up

scripts. I don't know. It will come up with five scripts, use the tokens, and then I'm not in the mood to shoot that day. That's it. For me, it's much easier

day. That's it. For me, it's much easier to build a skill that will convert my thoughts into a beautiful script. And

that skill also has information about what's worked because I ran the whole analytics uh uploading my stats and my comments. It's a process and everybody

comments. It's a process and everybody figures it out for themselves. There is

no one for all solution. Uh but I I don't think you should just be blindly token maxing because just because you're not a billion dollar company. So I am really watching the cost of AI because

it does get really expensive especially propensity computer tokens are they are expensive but I love it. Anyways, these

were the real use cases from top CEOs and truly advanced AI users. Please

don't forget to subscribe to this channel. I interview AI entrepreneurs

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