why smart people are failing at ai
it’s january 2026.
half your feed is telling you what “AI skill” you need this year. prompting is dead. agents are the future. no wait, context engineering. next week it’ll be something else.
so you do the sensible thing.
save the post. bookmark the thread. add a course to your list. and slowly, you become rich in resources.
47 saved posts about AI. a folder called “essential AI.” three half-read newsletters. it’s honestly AI anxiety in a productivity costume.
And where the market’s looking for AI skills, the real AI builders keep saying one thing, again and again: AI skills don’t matter.
then what does?
to solve the missing piece,
i scraped through thousands of job descriptions. extracted the skills they highlight. mapped them against what hiring managers actually ask for.
here’s what i found
the market is screaming about 12 skills right now.
if you’re in marketing,
it’s 4 skills.
1/ AEO. ask engine optimization.
getting your brand mentioned when people ask ai for recommendations.
2/ ai ad generation.
test an ad the same day you get the insight.
3/ ai led performance marketing.
let ai do the grunt work of bid adjustments and budget reallocation.
4/ ai content production.
produce 50 pieces at the cost of 5.
if you’re in strategy & ops
there are three skills.
1/ automating business operations. any repeated process where humans touch documents repeatedly.
2/ agentic workflows. yc companies are obsessed with this. agents have goals and figure out their own rules.
3/ ai adoption strategy. you build the automation but your 10,000 employees still need to use it.
if you’re in product,
it’s three skills.
1/ ai product strategy. knowing which problem ai solves better than traditional code.
2/ ai prototyping. build working software in an hour, not mockups.
3/ ai evaluations. measuring if your ai feature actually works.
if you’re an engineer
it’s three skills.
1/ context engineering. the ai doesn’t need better prompts. it needs better context.
2/ RAG. giving ai live information, not stale training data.
3/ ai agents. building systems that decide what to do, not just generate text.
the skills are real.
the job descriptions mention them. linkedin shows 10x growth in profiles listing them. the courses are multiplying.
but none of these 12 skills matter
i also asked a different question to members who are actually building in ai. not learning about it. building products. shipping features. deploying systems.
“what got you promoted?”
”what got you hired?”
the answers broke my brain.
because nobody mentioned agentic workflows. nobody said “i learned RAG.” nobody brought up the ai prototyping course they finished.
they talked about problems they solved. systems they built. hours they saved their companies.
one ops lead
took vendor onboarding from four days to four hours.
a product manager
built an ai assistant that cut churn by 3 points. worth 2 crore annually.
a marketer
built a content system that let their team produce 50 variations while competitors produced 5.
now this seems obvious in hindsight.
of course, you solve problems with skills. what else would you do?
let’s be honest for a second.
in the last six months, how much time did you spend thinking about which ai skills to acquire? and how much time did you spend thinking about which problems at your company you could solve with ai? i’ll wait.
that’s what i thought.
we’re all collecting skills.
reading about RAG. watching tutorials on agents. saving linkedin posts about prompt engineering. telling ourselves we’re “staying current.”
nobody is auditing their company for broken processes and asking “can ai fix this?”.
the problem with learning skills
let’s take arjun (alias for privacy).
8 years experience. ops lead at a series C fintech in mumbai.
he spent three months learning to build agentic workflows. followed the tutorials. understood the architecture. could explain the difference between workflows and agents in his sleep.
workflows follow rules. agents have goals and make their own rules to achieve them. he knew this cold.
then his CEO asked him to fix vendor onboarding. four days per vendor. five people touching every document. compliance bottleneck killing their growth.
arjun froze.
he knew how to build agents.
he didn’t know if this problem needed an agent.
maybe a simple workflow was enough. maybe it needed RAG to pull compliance documents. maybe it needed nothing and the real problem was process design.
the skill was in his head.
but what about judgement?
these examples don’t stop here.
i found three people in the community who solved almost identical problems. vendor onboarding. compliance heavy. 4 to 5 day cycle. manual document processing.
the first one built a workflow.
document comes in, extraction runs, matches to purchase order, flags exceptions, routes approvals. simple automation. no agents. four days became six hours.
the second one built an agent.
same problem. but their vendors sent documents in wildly inconsistent formats. handwritten notes. email threads. verbal approvals referenced in attachments. the agent learned to handle ambiguity. four days became four hours.
third one didn’t build anything new.
realized their existing systems had APIs nobody was using. connected them with a basic RAG pipeline that could answer “what’s the status of this vendor” by pulling from six different tools. the time savings came from people not chasing information. four days became one day.
same problem.
workflow vs agent vs RAG. the skill was variable. the problem was the constant.
this is what proof of work actually means
if you’ve read the proof of work series, you remember the cupcake company.
three chefs apply.
one brings a philosophy PDF. second one brings certificates. the third brings three variations of their bestselling cupcake with cost savings calculated.
ai skills work the same way.
certificates about agentic workflows?
that’s the philosophy PDF.
completed coursera course on RAG?
that’s the certificate.
“i reduced vendor onboarding from four days to four hours. here’s how. here’s the system. here’s the annual savings.” that’s the cupcake.
the market doesn’t pay for skills.
it pays for problems solved.
which one are you building right now?
philosophy PDFs or cupcakes?
what this looks like in product
let’s call her meera. product manager at a B2B saas company. 400 crore ARR. their onboarding completion rate was stuck at 41%.
the obvious answer was “improve onboarding UX.” she’d done that twice already. marginal gains.
she could have learned ai prototyping. built mockups faster. tested ideas quicker. the skill everyone says PMs need.
instead she spent two weeks
watching session recordings.
found the pattern. users got stuck at the same three points. not confused about what to do. confused about why they should do it.
she built an ai assistant that watched user behavior in real time. stuck on a feature? surfaced a 30 second contextual video. confused by terminology? inline definitions appeared. dropped off mid setup? triggered a personalized email with exactly where they left off.
the skill underneath?
context engineering.
the ai needed to know where the user was, what they’d done, what they hadn’t, and what typically worked for users like them.
but meera didn’t start with “i should learn context engineering.” she started with “41% completion is broken and i need to understand why.”
onboarding completion went to 67%.
churn dropped 3 points.
finance impact? ₹2.1 crore annually.
what this looks like in engineering
raj and vikram both work at fintech companies. both got asked to build ai features for customer support.
raj learned everything about agents.
tool use. state management. guardrails. built an agent that could access their knowledge base, check order status, process refunds, escalate to humans.
took him four months. the agent worked. but customers hated it. felt like talking to a robot pretending to be helpful. usage dropped after the first week.
vikram took a different approach.
spent two weeks reading support tickets. found that 60% of queries were the same twelve questions. but the answers changed constantly. pricing updates. policy changes. new features.
he built a simple RAG system.
no agent. just retrieval.
customer asks a question, system pulls the current answer from their docs, support rep reviews and sends. response time dropped from 6 hours to 20 minutes.
not because RAG is better than agents. because RAG was right for that problem. the support team didn’t need an autonomous agent. they needed faster access to accurate information.
raj had better skills.
vikram had better judgment about which skill to use.
are you raj or vikram?
building the impressive thing or the right thing?
what this looks like in marketing
sneha runs performance marketing for a D2C brand. 1.2 crore monthly ad spend.three person team.
every ai marketing article told her to learn ai ad generation. produce more creatives. test more variations. the algorithms will find winners.
she tried it. generated 200 ad variations in a week. conversion rates did not move. cost per acquisition stayed flat.
the problem wasn’t creative volume.
the problem was that her brand was not coming inside GPT for trusted reviews. she pivoted to AEO. ask engine optimization. figured out how to get her brand mentioned when people asked chatgpt for product recommendations in her category. took three months of experimentation. no course existed for this.
brand mentions inside ai went from zero to consistent presence. and those users converted at 2x the rate of google traffic.
the skill she needed was not the skill everyone said she needed.
the framework that actually works
stop asking
“what ai skill should i learn?”
start asking
“what problem in my company is broken, expensive, or slow?”
then figure out
which skill solves it.
have a process problem?
repeated steps that follow predictable rules?
that’s workflow automation.
same process but…
documents come in chaotic formats, verbal approvals, handwritten notes? you need an agent that handles ambiguity.
built an automation but…
nobody uses it? that’s an adoption problem.
have a tech/prod problem?
you don’t know which feature to build next?
that’s ai product strategy.
you keep burning dev cycles on ideas that fail?
that’s a prototyping problem.
your ai feature doesn’t know user history or state?
that’s context engineering.
your ai gives outdated or wrong information?
that’s a RAG problem.
your users need to take actions across multiple tools?
that’s an agent problem.
you shipped the ai feature but can’t tell if it’s working?
that’s an evaluation problem.
have a marketing problem?
people can’t find you…
when they ask ai for recommendations? that’s AEO.
stuck at creative production?
that’s ai ad generation.
managing campaigns at scale..
killing your team? that’s ai led performance marketing.
need 50 pieces of content but…
can only make 5? that’s ai content production.
every skill on that list of 12 solves a specific type of problem. the judgment is knowing which problem you actually have.
also, senior folks:
seniority without ai is a liability
sorry for saying the uncomfortable part. if someone with 30% less experience but twice the problem solving ability with ai applied for your job tomorrow, who wins?
your years of experience?
still valuable.
but only if you can
deploy that judgment at scale.
arjun knew more about agents than anyone in his company. didn’t help him solve the vendor onboarding problem because he couldn’t see past the skill to the actual need.
meera had average ai knowledge. but she understood her users deeply enough to know where ai could intervene.
seniority plus ai is a lethal combo.
your taste. your pattern recognition. your understanding of what works. all of that becomes infinitely more valuable when you can deploy it through the right tool.
seniority without ai?
you’re competing on time served.
what do you know about your company that a junior person with ai skills doesn’t? that knowledge is your edge. but only if you can deploy it.
don’t panic though
the people who mastered digital marketing in 2010 weren’t smarter than you. they just started. the people who learned mobile development in 2012 weren’t more capable. they just moved. they just started.
you have time.
not to learn about ai.
but to solve problems with ai.
those are very different things.
so tonight, flip the question.
you’ve been asking “what ai skill should i learn?”
wrong question.
here’s the framework one more time.
find the most broken, expensive, or slow process at your company. figure out what type of problem it is. match it to the skill that solves that type of problem. build the solution. measure the impact.
that’s it.
problem first.
skill second.
those 47 saved ai posts?
they’ll still be there.
the newsletters can wait.
the bookmarks aren’t going anywhere.
but the problem at your company?
that’s your first ai project.
that’s your proof of work.
it’s time to build.
on that note
how do you know if you’re on the right track while building?
feedback.
from one, two, a hundred people.
we’re making getting that feedback easier at GrowthX.
by getting you into rooms w/ top AI builders
by actually facilitating conversations through events, weekly live-learning sessions, and projects.
so you can focus on the stuff that matters.
and get better 10X faster.
5313+ leaders at top companies - Meta, Google, Lovable, Sarvam & ElevenLabs are in.
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Great read