AI Super Network: Why AI Relationships Beat AI Skills Alone
Quick Summary
What No Longer Works In AI
As AI accelerates, one person can no longer stay up to date with all the tools and skills necessary for 10,000x productivity. Staying on top of the entire AI field now is like trying to keep up with the whole Internet in 1995.
In other words, just learning AI skills on your own, no matter how smart or committed you are, is a losing strategy.
The Big New Idea: The 8 People You Need In Your Network To Become A World-Class AI Thought Leader
To ultimately get 10,000x leverage in the next 5 years, you need to build an “AI Super Network”. This network comprises people with complementary AI skills who come together to form an AI-first team.
Skillset #1: AI Building
Prompt Engineering (creating and evaluating text, video, image prompts)
Context Engineering (collecting, storing, and accessing synthetic data to help AI)
Automation (chaining and orchestrating agents and APIs together)
Coding (building AI apps)
Skillset #2: AI Thinking
Core Subject Matter Expertise (frameworks, workflows)
AI Strategy (vision, philosophy, frameworks, tactics, planning, marketing)
Content Creation (text, image, video)
Product (user experience, design, testing)
As AI evolves and becomes more complex, it will be harder and harder to be a generalist and stay on the frontier of each specialty. That’s why each bullet point above ultimately is a unique specialty, ideally represented by one person in your network.
Ultimately, these complementary skills help you create high-value, high-quality AI assets (prompts, automations, apps) at scale.
The Big Implication
Relationship building is now key to success in the AI era if you’re an entrepreneur, knowledge worker, or thought leader who wants to be on the AI frontier.
Therefore, two things are particularly critical to do now:
Improve your relationship-building skills
Allocate AI time toward relationship building, not just skill building
Personal Case Study: 3 Profound Changes After A Few Months Of Relationship Building
Since doubling down on relationship building with people in AI just a few months ago, my business and career trajectory have completely changed in a way that is surreal to me:
It led me to co-found Cozora with
and , a live community for people building with AI.It led me to transform my solopreneur newsletter into a studio that now has 5 other world-class partners in just two months. More on this announcement next month.
It led me to collaborate with iconic business strategist Jay Abraham and
to co-create an AI prompt newsletter based on Jay’s frameworks.
After just three articles with accompanying prompts, Jay’s AI prompt newsletter is already earning $50,000 in gross annualized revenue.
What You Get In Today’s Article
I share my personal journey and lessons learned building relationships in the AI era.
I share a fascinating academic research that analyzed 20 million studies and 2 million patents, which found that solo researchers were MORE likely to break through in 1950, and team researchers are 6x MORE likely to break through today. This study shaped my decision-making.
I share a $350+ discount code to join Cozora at the bottom of this email (for paid subscribers only)
FULL ARTICLE: My First AI Decision That Changed Everything
Almost three years ago, I made the most important decision of my career. I decided to go all-in on AI based on one simple calculation:
AI is the most important technology ever created
It’s growing faster than any other technology in history
Being early is infinitely better than being late
I should spend as much time as possible understanding AI holistically (philosophically, strategically, and tactically)
To me, this is the key AI decision to make first.
It’s why I spent hundreds of hours understanding AI timelines, the importance of timing, and the top 100 AI mental models. This gave them the understanding necessary to decide whether to go all-in on AI.
It’s also why Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of the largest company in the world, said this:
Recently, I made a second decision that was just as important.
Here’s the backstory…
I Hit Bottom This Summer When I Spent 120+ Hours Learning AI Automation, Only To Lose Subscribers
This summer, I decided to learn about AI automation using Make.com. In the end, I spent 120+ hours building 20 automations.
On the one hand, the experience was exhilarating. I could suddenly build things I couldn’t even imagine before. I was proud of myself for pushing through the painful hours of debugging and reaching the other side.
On the other hand, the experience was overwhelming. 120+ hours is a lot of time, and it caused me to produce less blockbuster content, which resulted in losing paid subscribers:
After months of experiencing the dual emotions of exhilaration and overwhelm, I realized there just wasn’t a way for me, as an individual — no matter how smart or committed — to stay on the frontiers of AI and grow my business at the same time. I also realized that this challenge would only become harder.
If I tried to learn other fundamental AI skills (e.g., RAG databases, using Claude Code, Vibe Code, video prompts, image prompts), I’d have less and less time to work on my business in the short term.
Said differently, my experience over the summer helped me see the writing on the wall. I saw a future in which I was working overtime to stay on the frontier of AI while falling further and further behind.
In other words, I needed a fundamentally different approach that allowed me to learn faster in the long term and create more and better in the short term.
At a deeper level, this was the realization I had…
AI Thought Leadership Is Not A Solopreneur Sport
Traditional thought leadership is fundamentally a solopreneur business.
Sure, some newsletters and books are co-authored, but those are far and few between.
When it comes to writing, partnership is actually harder than working alone on several levels:
Voice: Writing under one shared voice is harder than writing under your own voice.
Narrative: It’s harder to share two people’s stories rather than one cohesive narrative.
Winner-take-all Attribution. With co-authors, readers wonder “who really wrote this?”
AI Thought Leadership (also known as prompt leadership) is different.
You don’t just create content. You also create accompanying prompts, automations, and apps.
It’s closer to a software business than to a knowledge entrepreneurship business because it’s much easier to divide and conquer on the two sets of skills necessary to create an AI-first team or company:
Skillset #1: AI Building
Prompt Engineering (creating and evaluating text, video, image prompts)
Context Engineering (collecting, storing, and accessing synthetic data to help AI)
Automation (chaining and orchestrating agents and APIs together)
Coding (building AI apps)
Skillset #2: AI Thinking
Core Subject Matter Expertise (frameworks, workflows)
AI Strategy (vision, philosophy, frameworks, tactics, planning, marketing)
Content Creation (text, image, video)
Product (user experience, design, testing)
Each bullet point above ultimately represents a unique specialty, ideally represented by one person in your network. Dividing and conquering on these skills is easy and natural.
What’s important to understand about each of these skillsets is this…
Each Core Skill Takes Thousands Of Hours To Master
Just like other advanced skills, such as becoming a computer programmer or doctor, becoming world-class takes years of transformative learning on multiple levels:
Mindsets
Workflows
Habits
Tools
Skills
Frameworks
Paradigm shifts that take
Not only that, the bar to stay on the frontier is getting higher and higher at a faster and faster rate on a few levels:
The complexity of the AI skills are increasing.
New AI skills to master are continually emerging.
New AI tools and tool categories will emerge.
Bottom line:
It’s becoming increasingly clear that specialization and team collaboration are necessary to stay on the frontier. Therefore, each of the eight core AI skills likely needs one person who makes it their core focus to specialize in that area.
Having A Team Of Specialists Is Important Because AI Content Shock Is Making It Harder To Stand Out
We are moving into a world where more and more thought leaders share AI prompts and automations as posts on social media, articles in their newsletter, and assets in their paid membership areas. For example, in this article, Jonas Bradbaart shares an automation…
In this X post, Cas.Fyn shows how to create user-generated content videos with AI:
Six months ago, no one was sharing prompts. Now, my inbox is flooded with posts like the ones above.
The brutal reality is that this environment very rapidly leads to overwhelm and confusion among readers:
It’s hard to remember to use prompts in the right moment repeatedly—especially when it’s not your prompt.
It’s hard to evaluate the quality of prompts.
In addition to prompt overwhelm, we’re entering an unprecedented era of content shock, as AI-first creators flood the Internet with AI-generated content.
Toward this end, it’s important to realize that for a new generation of content creators, this is what their workstation looks like:
Source: Vietnamese AI-First, Digital Marketing Company
And this is how a growing percentage of books are being produced:
Source: Razib Ul karim
The brutal truth is that many readers and consumers can’t tell the difference today between AI-generated and human-generated content, and the quality and quantity of AI outputs is increasing exponentially:
Bottom line:
Following the solopreneur playbook is going to work with fewer and fewer people. They will be overwhelmed by AI thought leaders who use AI to expand the quality, quantity, and authenticity of their ideas.
The Fascinating Research On Ideal Team Sizes
A seminal 2007 academic paper, which reviewed 19.9 million academic papers and 2.1 million patents, found that the average size of teams has steadily increased over the last few decades for many science specialties.
For example, below are specific numbers on the average growth in team size in particular fields:
Science & Engineering: Average authors per paper rose from 1.9 → 3.5 over 45 years.
Social Sciences: Team-authored papers rose from 17.5% → 51.5%.
Patents: Inventors per patent rose from 1.7 → 2.3 (1975–2000).
Not only that, team papers were more highly cited and more likely to lead to breakthroughs:
In the 1950s, solo authors more often produced singularly influential papers.
By 2000, teams became 6× more likely than solo authors to produce extremely highly cited work.
The authors of the 2007 paper hypothesize three reasons for the trend…
Higher cost: Certain fields face growing experimental/technical costs and larger infrastructures (“Big Science”). These pressures push researchers to collaborate, pool resources, and bring in more specialized expertise.
Field complexity: As knowledge grows, research problems increasingly require multiple specialities. The authors note that even fields with low capital intensity (e.g., mathematics, economics) exhibit the team-growth trend, suggesting specialization/division of labor plays a role.
Easier communication: Improved communications, collaborative tools, and networked scientists make team work more feasible across institutions and countries.
When it comes to AI, I’d argue that the field is also getting more complex and higher cost as well, which will drive more benefits for collaboration.
Why Now Is The Time To Build Relationships
I started building relationships in 2007, when a friend and I reached out to 25 20-something entrepreneurs who had built 7-figure businesses and invited them to a mastermind retreat in Mexico.
We sent cold emails to everyone, almost all of whom we had been reading about for years in articles and magazines. To our surprise, despite not knowing us, nearly everyone said yes.
Some of my closest friendships to this day were formed during that retreat.
In retrospect, the retreat was so effective because we were all in our early 20s, and we felt alone as young entrepreneurs because we hadn’t yet built a network of people like us.
Fast forward seven years and dozens of mastermind retreats. I noticed that it became harder and harder to recruit people to our events. When I asked people why, I got the same response over and over:
I already have so many entrepreneur friends. My biggest challenge now is keeping in touch with everyone, not meeting new people.
That’s when I realized a critical lesson about relationship building—timing matters.
More specifically, it’s easier to build relationships when people are just starting something big and brand new while also feeling alone. This is why many deep friendships are formed during the first semester at college, or the first year of being a parent, or the first year of moving to a new location. Once we get acclimated to the new thing and build a network, we stop looking for new people to meet.
Right now, thousands of people every month are going all-in on AI and looking for collaborators. In a few years, this window will be closed.
Announcing Cozora—A Community For AI Builders
This summer, I started reaching out to people on Substack doing interesting things with AI. This led to meeting
and . After months of chatting, we realized that there was a big need to bring AI creators together in a community to help them build with AI together and find collaborators.This week, I’m excited to announce that we’re officially launching Cozora, which does just that. Here’s how it works:
Show & Tell Thursdays. Every Thursday at 11:00am EST, you get access to the prompts, automations, and apps that frontier creators are making. By the end of each month, you get 4+ working systems running in your business.
Collaborating Matching. Get matched with technical partners, designers, and strategists and get support shipping.
Our vision to grow to hundreds of members in the upcoming year.
Paid Member Discount: If you’re a paid subscriber, you get a 20-50% discount depending on whether you are an annual member or a monthly member. The 50% discount is a $360 annual savings. Scroll to the bottom of this post to access the discount codes.
I’ll be sharing more about Cozora in the coming weeks.
For now, this article on the power of relationship building for AI success begs a critical question...
What’s the best way to build an AI super network of collaborators and peers?
It turns out that I am uniquely qualified to answer this question.
Professional relationship building happens to be an area I love and excel at.
In my previous life, I wrote a column for Forbes on professional relationship building. In this column, I interviewed leading academic researchers in the field of social network science and some of the top super connectors in the world. My favorite article that I wrote back then was The No. 1 Predictor Of Career Success According To Network Science.
Furthermore, before I became a writer and teacher, I co-founded a 7-figure education business that hosted 450+ conferences, including ones at the White House and United Nations. These events included attendees that I personally recruited, such as:
Governors
Senators
Congressmen
Billionaire Entrepreneurs
University Presidents
Heads Of Major Foundations
Senior Government Officials
We also hosted dozens of weekend mastermind retreats for 7- to 9-figure entrepreneurs.
We were able to recruit so many amazing attendees because I love connecting with people and because I understood the specific skills required to connect and convene at the highest levels.
Tomorrow, I’m going to share the my top takeaways from these experiences that helped me build relationships in the AI world so quickly and deeply.
Free Webinar Tomorrow
Tomorrow at 1:00pm-2:30pm EST, I’ll be leading a free webinar that shares my biggest lessons learned on building an AI Super Network. During the call, I’ll share:
Where to find AI builders open to collaboration
How to get in the door with a simple email
How to hit it off on the first call and set the foundation for a deeper relationship
How to turn relationships into life-changing collaborations
Link To Join The Zoom Call
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/3351050036?pwd=NyRNGOtbbUa2KafJvkvbCjOTWqpWj5.1
Meeting ID: 335 105 0036
Passcode: 603725