You are not ten years behind. You are forty hours behind.

Last week in Lisbon, I ran a session for a room of product people on what AI is changing our craft. By the end of it, something strange had happened. People were energized and visibly anxious at the same time. A few came up after and said some version of the same thing: "This is exciting, but I feel like I'm falling behind."

In the Mastermind session we dived deeper into it and I made sure to make this point clear: it may feel like you're 10 years behind, but you're actually just a few focused hours behind.

The gap is smaller than it feels

When you scroll LinkedIn and see someone shipping an agent workflow you have never touched, or a peer describing how their team restructured around Claude and Cursor, the distance feels enormous. It looks like years of accumulated knowledge. It is not.

Most of what looks like a ten-year gap is actually ten to forty hours of focused use. The people who seem fluent have not been studying in secret since 2019. They sat down, picked a tool, and used it on real work for a few weeks. That is the whole moat. And the moat keeps getting shallower, because every few weeks a new tool arrives that is easier to adopt than the one before it. If you miss this week's wave, the next one will meet you closer to where you already are.

This does not mean you can ignore what is happening. You cannot. Staying informed and aware is the baseline. But you do not need to jump on every bandwagon, and you definitely do not need to feel ten years behind because you spent the last month shipping your roadmap instead of rebuilding your workflow.

What you actually need to track

I have been working on this problem with Mike Pilawski, Blagoja Golubovski, and Sergiu Lazar Angelescu for a while now, and we are starting to support more and more companies through this transition. One thing keeps coming back in every conversation: people want to know what is going to happen. They want a prediction so they can plan around it. We do not give them one, because nobody honest can.

What we do instead is walk through three scenarios for how the next five years might unfold.

The first is gradual integration. AI capability continues to improve, but adoption lags, as it has in every prior technology transition. Organizations adapt at their own pace. Early movers gain real but manageable advantages. This is the historically plausible path. Technology adoption is almost always slower than the loudest voices predict.

The second is accelerated structural change. Adoption catches up with capability faster than scenario one suggests, driven by competitive pressure and the fact that AI is now being used to build the next generation of itself. Team structures shift faster than most organizations have planned for. Business models that felt stable start compressing.

The third is significant disruption. AI-native challengers, operating with cost structures incumbents cannot match without destroying their own margins (throwback to the Innovator's Dillemma), take material share across categories that seemed defensible. The window to lead the change closes for organizations that have not already built the capacity to move.

We do not know which one will unfold. Anyone who tells you they do is selling something. What matters is building the ability to read the signals as they develop, and not freezing in place while you wait for consensus.

The honest complication

Here is what I did not say clearly enough in Lisbon, and what I want to correct now.

The reason the forty-hour framing is freeing, not dismissive, is that it only holds if you are actually using AI on real work. Reading articles does not count. Watching demos does not count. Attending another training session does not count. The gap closes through contact with your own problems, not through exposure to someone else's solution.

This is what we are delivering with our online program (already half-way through).

This is also why the anxiety in the room was not entirely misplaced. If we are in scenario one, forty hours over the next two months is enough. If we are closer to scenario two or three, the same forty hours over the next two weeks might be what separates leaders who shape their team's transition from leaders who inherit someone else's. The timeline is genuinely unclear. The action is not.

What to do this week

You do not need a grand plan. Pick one part of your work where the friction is obvious. A document you dread writing. A review you keep postponing. A dataset you never get to analyze. Spend four hours using one AI tool on it, not to prove a point, but to get the work done. Start doing that once a week. Your forty hours will be done soon.

Then look up and notice how the signals around you have shifted. The people who felt ten years ahead will look a lot closer than they do today.

What is the one task you have been avoiding that you could put an AI on this week? And if you were in the room in Lisbon, did the reframing land differently when you got home than it did in the moment?