I attended a live taping of the Shift AI podcast yesterday afternoon in Seattle - their 100th episode!

If you haven’t listened before, host Boaz Ashkenazy pulls some pretty fascinating and high-profile interviews.

Yesterday’s event with guest LeSean Smith from Google caught my eye because it was all about what agentic AI is opening up for “the little guy”.

Yes, LeSean has spent time at the big guys - Google, and Amazon, and Microsoft - but he’s also an investor, operator and solo builder himself.

I’ll share the episode when it comes out but some key takeaways from LeSean:

• AI is going to accelerate opportunities in a ‘barbell’ shape — i.e. it’s going to help the giant tech enterprises and the tiny one-person shops (like us!) gobble-up anything playing in the middle
• Building agentic “skills” for your AI of choice is the biggest unlock — McDonalds is able to train any teenager in the world to make burgers in 2 days because they’ve spent the time to get the SOP down. Doing the same for your solo business sounds overly technical, but it’s the most effective way to leverage AI to your benefit, and in a token-efficient way.
• Upskilling yourself is no longer optional — even if you feel like you’re nearing the end of your career, you need to get in the “AI gym” 5-10 hours per week to remain competitive in today’s market.

And my favorite one-liner from the afternoon - if you think you're already behind, you're not.

As LeSean says, "We're only in the 'dial-up' phase of AI."

Much more when the episode goes live.

In the meantime, here’s Boaz’s Nov 2025 episode with DocuSign Founder & CEO Court Lorenzini on scaling founders in an AI-abundant world.

💡

-Wes