Entrepreneurial Edge: Artificial Intelligence Will Not Eat Your
Posted: February 17th, 2026
Written By: David Volk, December 31, 2025
The more you learn about and use artificial intelligence (AI), the more you will see your skill set improve. The best is yet to come as you embrace and adapt to the changes.
What Is AI?
You could call it the internet on steroids. Lots and lots of steroids. It does not simply give you source material links based on a search query or prompt. It analyzes that universe of information and creates summaries of information with citations showing where the organized analysis was drawn from. Let’s begin with a primer taken from an amazing recent overview article at the Florida Bar’s practice management website legalzoom.org. In The Florida Bar Guide to Getting Started with AI, July 28, 2025, the article does a great job stressing the risks in use of AI in the legal profession. It tells us Florida was the first state to issue an ethics opinion regarding the use of AI. The legal profession is seeing many lawyers being sanctioned and facing disciplinary proceedings for misuse of AI results in particular where memo of law content is a hallucination. We have to verify any cited authority to make sure it is real and face confidentiality risks among many other concerns. The article is useful in giving simple definitions.
“Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the simulation of human intelligence by machines programmed to think, learn, and problem-solve like humans. AI performs tasks such as understanding language, recognizing patterns, and making decisions. An AI program is also called a "model." Common AI terms include:
Generative AI: A type of AI model that creates new content, such as text, images, or music, based on large amounts of training data. It uses neural networks to predict the next word or element based on context. Examples for text include OpenAI's ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and Anthropic’s Claude, and for images ChatGPT, Gemini, Adobe and Midjourney. A generative AI model that is text-based is called a large language model (LLM).
Hallucination: The generation of incorrect or nonsensical information by an AI model, occurring when the AI produces outputs not based on input data or context, leading to factual inaccuracies.
Multimodal AI: AI that can process and understand multiple types of data simultaneously, such as text, images, audio, and video.
Neural Network: A computing system inspired by the human brain's network of neurons, consisting of interconnected layers of nodes that process data, enabling the AI to recognize patterns.
Prompt: An input or instruction given to an AI model. The more detailed and specific the prompt, the better the AI’s response or output.”
How does generative AI Work? Generative AI uses neural networks trained on massive amounts of data to recognize patterns. When given a question or prompt, the model uses these learned patterns to predict the best outputs, such as text or images. Training a generative AI model takes months because of the enormous amounts of data and the neural network’s process of learning and optimization. Generative AI is impressive but not perfect. Because AI predictions are just highly customized suggestions, they can occasionally be wrong.
Researchers are working on the next level of AI, which will allow it to reason and use logic.
How Is The Field Growing?
The World Economic Forum Future Of Jobs Report 2025 (Jobs Report 2025) states: “Since the release of Chat GPT in November 2022, investment flows into AI have increased nearly eightfold. This influx of capital has been accompanied by investment in the physical infrastructure needed to support these emerging technologies, including servers and energy generation plants. By leveraging natural language processing technology, GenAI enables users to interact with it as though they were conversing with a human, considerably reducing barriers to usage and the need for specialized technical knowledge. Accordingly, the demand for GenAI skills by both businesses and individuals has also grown significantly.” The investment and new industries development is rapidly accelerating. Massive data centers which carry out the generative work are being built around the country and will consume massive amounts of electricity which is spurring development of small nuclear power generators and will significantly increase and stress the generation of electricity from natural gas. Green deluded states and countries are at a massive disadvantage in the data center race as energy needs rise. Are you going to build your AI data center in an energy starved state or a resources rich state? (Do a bit of research on the California and Europe growing electricity crisis. Like I was told many times as a kid, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.)
Aren’t Technological Advances Job Killers?
Cars hurt the horse and buggy industry. Jobs were lost, but the net impact was wildly positive. And yet, the mind is overwhelmed thinking about the positive job creation impact in the car industry and travel and leisure industry. Henry Ford created the assembly line and created good paying jobs so workers could have a decent life and afford to buy cars. Who would take a five-hundred-mile vacation trip if you had to do it in a horse drawn carriage? Would those hotels up and down the beach be there in that world? Of course not.
“When we add up all the jobs created, we find that over 19 million jobs have been created as a result of the personal computer and Internet. We see a net gain of 15.8 million jobs in the US over the last few decades. And that’s about 10 percent of the civilian labor force today, is in an occupation or a job that’s a direct result of the introduction of this technology.”
Imagine a life without the internet and personal computers. Those certainly hurt the typewriter industry, but I do not think anyone wants to go back to typed letters, carbon paper, and white out. Reflect on the massive increase in available information. Less library activity and the biggest library ever conceived is at your fingertips in your home and office. Life without a cell phone would bring back pay phones and home answering machines, but we would all agree we like the advanced technology much better. Uber and Lyft hurt cab companies. Now, you can get a ride in ten minutes instead of calling and waiting for up to an hour.
Most Skillsets Will Survive And Benefit
Jobs Report 2025 says that skillsets will be enhanced. “Some of these studies have highlighted ways for generative AI to enhance human core skills, or to substitute for tacit knowledge among newer or average performing workers. Other studies have shown generative AI can enhance knowledge work if applied appropriately within its capability, but risks producing adverse outcomes where users unknowingly stretch it beyond its capability. Looking further ahead, some observers argue generative AI could empower less specialized employees to perform a greater range of “expert” tasks – expanding the possible functions of roles such as Accounting Clerks, Nurses, and Teaching Assistants. Similarly, the technology could equip skilled professionals such as Electricians, Doctors or Engineers with the world’s forefront knowledge – enabling them to solve complex problems more efficiently. Outcomes such as these – which create genuine shifts in the quantity or quality of output – are more likely to come about if technology development is focused on enhancing rather than substituting for human capabilities.” Put more simply, the less skilled have a talent multiplier to perform at a higher level, and advance workers will leap forward with a massive data advantage to advance their already impressive skillset.
Your Survival Skills
I will close with content from my AI Perplexity Enterprise prompt “What skills will be most valuable as AI automates tasks.” (Internal cites omitted, there were a lot of them.)
“The most valuable skills in an AI-heavy world are a mix of strong human skills (thinking, relating, leading) and enough technical fluency to work effectively with AI tools. Employers expect nearly 4 in 10 core job skills to change by 2030, so adaptability and continuous learning matter as much as any single skill.
Human thinking skills
- Analytical thinking: Ability to interpret data, evaluate arguments, and make evidence-based decisions remains one of the top skills on the rise across industries. AI can surface patterns, but humans still frame the questions and choose actions.
- Creative thinking: Generating novel ideas, products, or solutions is expected to grow significantly in importance because AI struggles with open-ended, ambiguous problems.
Adaptability and self-management
- Resilience, flexibility, and agility: Reports highlight these as core differentiators between growing and declining roles, especially as tasks change faster than job titles. Adapting to new tools, workflows, and business models is becoming a baseline requirement.
- Curiosity and lifelong learning: Continuous upskilling is cited by employers as essential because skill needs are shifting quickly and AI tools themselves evolve.
Social and leadership skills
- Communication and collaboration: AI-specific job listings increasingly emphasize communication, people skills, and collaboration alongside technical abilities, especially in design, product, and client-facing roles. Explaining complex ideas clearly and working across disciplines are hard to automate.
- Leadership and social influence: Guiding teams, managing talent, and aligning human and AI work are all in the World Economic Forum’s top rising skills. These skills become more important as organizations reshape around AI.
Digital and AI fluency
- Technological literacy: Understanding how AI, data, networks, and cybersecurity work at a conceptual level is one of the fastest-rising clusters of skills. Even non-technical roles increasingly require confident use of AI tools.
- AI literacy and data skills: Being able to prompt, evaluate, and supervise AI systems, interpret data outputs, and spot bias or errors is becoming a cross-cutting requirement, not just for specialists.