"How do you spell Claude? Is that with an e?"
While at an event last week, I was sitting at a table with a group of professionals when I heard an individual ask this.
"I don't use Chat," they said right before that.
I almost fell out of my chair.
How can it be that in 2026, when we're three years into the AI revolution, an individual who works in a professional environment knows nothing about AI? They don't know about Claude, and they don't use ChatGPT?
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I don't expect everyone to be experts in AI, and depending on your career journey, your usage is going to differ, and I completely understand that. But you have to be living under a rock to be in the middle of your career and not be aware that AI can help revolutionize the way you work, the way you think, and the way you operate.
I was in London in January 2024, just 45 days after ChatGPT launched to the public. I had heard the rumblings of this generative AI product that was helping people to brainstorm, be a thought partner, support their writing, and more. At that time, ChatGPT was simply a tool that could help you take massive amounts of text and data and simplify it, among other things.
While waiting for my family to get ready for the day, I opened my laptop and pointed my browser at ChatGPT.com and asked it to help me brainstorm some ideas. Within minutes, I was hooked. A few weeks later, I bought a $20 monthly membership, and I've never looked back. At this point, I can't live without it, as it's a part of my personal and professional routine. I use it for work, for life, for recipes, for fact-checking, for travel, for challenging me; the list goes on.
Then, in December last year, I was struggling to figure out how to build my website. On Christmas Day of all time, I was sitting there watching football with my extended family, and I started to ask Claude how it could help me build my website. Fast forward just nine months later, I've built an entire robust website with digital products, form fills, a robust blog, and, not to mention, a coaching product via SMS that communicates back and forth with you 24 hours a day to answer all of your career-related issues and questions. (TheScottBond.com/Signal)
I spend $100 a month today on Claude, and I can't imagine life without it.
The tools that exist around you are able to take your career to places you never knew, but you must be willing to start to brainstorm, ask questions, challenge your thinking, and more. The only difference between you and the person achieving their goals is that they are willing to use every ounce of resources around them, and AI is, without a doubt, the game changer.
And if you think it's going to eventually kill all of us, then so be it; I'd rather die knowing I had access to life-changing tools and opportunities than to live in the Stone Age rubbing two sticks together to start a fire.
The gap is becoming the people who know how to use the tools around them and the people who refuse to try.
The crazy thing is, none of these tools require technical skills. You do not need to know how to code. You do not need to understand machine learning. You do not need to know how a large language model works. You simply need to be curious enough to ask, "Can this help me do this better?" That one question can open an entirely different world of possibilities.
People are already using AI to prepare for interviews, analyze spreadsheets, write code, build businesses, create content, learn new industries, prepare presentations, understand contracts, improve their communication, and solve problems they never would have known how to solve on their own. The gap is no longer between the people who know everything and the people who do not. The gap is becoming the people who know how to use the tools around them and the people who refuse to try.
Your career has always been about adaptability. The people who learned email early had an advantage. The people who understood social media before everyone else had an advantage. The people who learned how to use data, automation, and digital tools had an advantage. AI is simply the next version of that, except the potential impact is exponentially larger.
So, no, you do not need to spend $100 a month on Claude or use ChatGPT every waking hour of your life. But you should probably know how to spell Claude. More importantly, you should understand what these tools can do for you, experiment with them, and figure out where they can make you better. Your career does not need you to become an AI expert. It just needs you to stop pretending the future is not already here.