Abhi Dewan

(this is an older post that I published on LinkedIn, I am also cross publishing it here now for posterity)

It’s official (at least at my company): if you’re not fluent in AI, getting hired will be an uphill climb.

Just now, I got an email from my CEO: “I’m going to deliberate about this” w/ respect to new-hires. He was referring to AI-Fluency.

Not just for engineers, but for everyone across the board.

I’ve never seen a skill become essential this quickly. The market isn’t waiting for policy or enterprise approval to catch up.

You don’t have to know the fundamentals behind LLMs, but if you’re not leveraging AI to up-level at least some part of your work, it’s not going to work out for you in the long run.

If you’re a personal assistant, you might ask Perplexity “Find me 5 French restaurants open on Thursday nights within 10 blocks of [Office Address] that have private/semi-private seating and gluten-free options.”

If you’re an analyst, you might ask O-1 Pro to write you a report on recent Series B transactions in a sector your firm is building a thesis in.

If you’re in sales, you might ask Claude to analyze the tone of a prospect’s email and craft a response that addresses concerns, adds urgency and establishes next steps.

AI is a permissionless up-leveler. You don’t a PhD in Machine Learning or a course to learn it. Just pop into ChatGPT and ask it “How should I start using AI to make myself better at my job?”