Sean’s AI Signal – Issue #7
Welcome to Signal! Every week I highlight 5 of the most useful ideas, tools, and conversations shaping AI right now. Think of it as your shortcut through the noise. Let’s dive in!
1. Prompt Strategy of the Week: Smarter Prompt Frameworks
Dr. Alex Young shared a thread of 10 prompt types that reframe how to use AI, from Chain of Thought to First Principles to Extreme Constraints. The big idea: AI is most powerful when you tell it who to be, not just what to do.
https://x.com/AlexanderFYoung/status/1964570532860547161
All 10 are worth considering, but I’d like to highlight Role Assignment. This is the one I use most, and it works incredibly well. Instead of asking AI a generic question, you assign it a role:
“Act as a Chief Customer Officer reviewing this deck from a recent competitive landscape study. Tell me what you’d find compelling, what you’d skim, and what would make you act.”
The output shifts from broad commentary to sharp, stakeholder-specific feedback that mirrors what you’d hear in the room.
Why it matters: Role assignment makes AI a stand-in for the audiences that matter most (.e.g., executives, customers, or competitors). For insights professionals, this means you can stress-test recommendations before presenting them, anticipate pushback, and refine messaging until it resonates. Instead of hoping research drives action, you can rehearse impact in advance turning insight delivery into something more persuasive, practical, and ultimately influential.
2. Wakeup Call of the Week: The Rise of the Infinite Workforce
God of Prompt laid out a stark view of where AI is headed:
AGI could arrive in 2–5 years (per OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic).
AI models are already writing much of their own code.
Robots can now learn complex skills in simulation (e.g., 1 hour = 10 years of practice).
Once AI automates itself, costs collapse while scale explodes (millions of AI “workers” at 100x speed).
Here is the full post on X for those who want to dive deeper (it’s totally worth it):
https://x.com/godofprompt/status/1964678621609824363
Why it matters: This isn’t about replacing a few jobs. It’s about a wholesale shift in how work gets done. AI is moving from being a tool you use to a workforce you manage that is cheap, fast, and infinitely scalable. For leaders, the gap between those who harness this workforce and those who don’t won’t be incremental, it will be existential! In insights, this means projects run with AI “teams” drafting surveys, analyzing data, and generating outputs in parallel. The human role shifts to directing, editing, and ensuring relevance, turning market researchers into orchestrators of an always-on AI workforce.
3. Interview of the Week: Balaji on Amplified Intelligence
This interview with Balaji Srinivasan on Peter Diamandis’ Moonshots podcast is wide-ranging and awesome! It’s well worth the read or listen in full.
But one point really stood out for me. Balaji argues we should stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and instead think of it as Amplified Intelligence. AI makes smart people smarter. The quality of the output depends on the quality of the input, which means domain expertise and human verification are still essential!
Why it matters: This framing cuts through the noise about AI “taking jobs.” In reality, AI mostly takes the job of the previous AI model. What AI really gives us is leverage, helping people expand their personal wingspan, moving from narrow specialists to capable generalists. Now, we can create, analyze, and ship at a much higher level than we could ever have dreamed of. The winners are the ones who know how to aim the right AI tool using expertise, prompts, and judgment to amplify impact! This is super exciting to me personally.
4. Reflection of the Week: Preparing for AI Like It’s Already Here
Jeffrey Emanuel has a must read post on X:
https://x.com/doodlestein/status/1963818340960399654
In it, he draws a powerful parallel: Alfred Loomis, who predicted the 1929 stock market crash, didn’t try to time it perfectly, he just got out when he knew it was coming. Likewise, once you believed the U.S. would enter WWII, the smart move was to start preparing as if war had already begun.
Emanuel applies the same logic to AI. The question isn’t whether disruption comes in 2028 or 2030. Once you believe it will happen, you need to change your perspective now in everything you do. In your work, investments, advice to your kids, and even your daily habits.
Why it matters: The upside won’t go to those who “wait and see,” but to those who prepare early and act like the shift is already here. That hit me hard, both personally and professionally. At PeopleMetrics, it’s why I’m rethinking how insights are generated and delivered. And as a father, it’s why I’m pushing my sons to become AI-native as soon as possible. The winners will be those who live in the future today, not tomorrow.
5. Quote of the Week: AI Needs Strong Foundations
Chris Ashley at Peak AI reminds us that AI is only as strong as the processes you anchor it to.
“AI Agents are only as good as the tools they use and the context they are grounded in. Go deep on mapping your critical business processes, the underlying systems, and the decision logic and data flows throughout… If you don’t understand your own processes intimately, your AI Agents have no chance.”
— Chris Ashley, VP Strategy, Peak AI
Why it matters: The temptation with AI agents is to treat them like magic boxes. We expect to drop them into the business and hope they produce value. But agents don’t fix broken processes, they magnify them! Companies with unclear decision logic, siloed data, or outdated systems will simply get faster confusion. The real competitive edge belongs to those who have already mapped their workflows. This means the first step in scaling Agentic AI isn’t building agents, it’s building clarity around process. Once you understand your business flows end-to-end, AI can automate, accelerate, and scale them. Without that foundation, AI is just noise.
Last Word: Stop Waiting, Start Acting!
History doesn’t reward those who try to perfectly time disruption. It rewards those who act with conviction once they see it coming. Radar in WWII, the internet in the 1990s, and now AI in the 2020s all favored the builders who had the courage to move quickly.
AI isn’t artificial, it’s amplified. It won’t replace you, it will expand you. But only if you start acting now. You need to build the habits, workflows, and systems today that others will still be debating tomorrow.
That’s where I’ll leave it this week. Five different signals, one core message: stop waiting for the future, start acting on it!