Announcing The Agentic Academy For Knowledge Work
If you’ve been reading this newsletter recently, you know this…
The paradigm shift to agentic AI is the most significant shift in knowledge work since the release of ChatGPT
While the chat paradigm facilitated a 1.5x productivity boost, the agentic paradigm has already facilitated a 20x productivity boost for the most pioneering AI companies, as I share in “I’m Not A Programmer” Will Be The New “I Can’t Read” In 5 Years.
And that productivity boost is increasing rapidly as Anthropic and OpenAI add new features at a rate I’ve never seen before.
For example…
#1. Top venture capitalist Marc Andreessen is seeing a 20x boost among his portfolio companies:
Source: Monitoring The Situation
“At our leading-edge companies, estimates are that the leading-edge programmers are 20X more productive than they were a year ago. It's the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity ever.”
—Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape and a16z
#2. Successful entrepreneur and president of Y Combinator, Garry Tan, saw a 400x boost in his productivity:
Source: Y Combinator
“ It turns out that I was actually doing 400x the amount of code. Obviously, I wasn't writing. I was directing 15 agents at a time to do so.”
—Garry Tan, President, Y Combinator
#3. Anthropic just released a report that showed that their programmers are 8x more productive since 2024:
Bottom line:
The agentic paradigm is already delivering significant productivity improvements, and that number is going to grow.
Programming is the “canary in the coal mine” of knowledge work for two reasons:
Programmers have been the first to adopt agentic AI because that was one of the first fields where the AI companies focused on training their models.
More and more knowledge work tasks are being turned into code that can perform the task at human-level autonomously.
Yet, a shockingly small number of people have made the shift to the agentic paradigm:
Here’s the reason why so few people have made the switch…
Adopting agentic AI is 10x harder than adopting chat AI
What I’ve seen is that most people need support in order to make the switch, because in order to get value, they need to:
Really understand its features
Lay the proper foundation
Create systems
Think strategically about what they build
I’ll be more specific. Below is just a small sampling of what you need to learn to make the shift:
Features: The 20+ essential agentic commands
Planning: How to create plans that build the tool you want to create in one shot
Error Correction: How to find the root cause of AI errors so they never happen again.
Evals: How to create built-in checks so that AI can correct itself
Knowledge Base: How to build an AI second brain with all of your data (transcripts, chats, etc)
Context File: How to teach the agent who you are, how you work, and what you are working on
Human In The Loop: Understand where you should be reviewing the AI’s work and where it can work autonomously
Connectors: How to connect agents to external apps you use in your work
Self-improve: How to make AI Agents learn and get better the more you use them
Automation: How to build skills that automate your work end-to-end
Security: How to safeguard your data from getting deleted, stolen, or distorted
Strategic: How to decide what to build when you can build anything
And more…
I personally love learning, and I had trouble making the shift on my own. It wasn’t until I hired a coach to teach me one-on-one that I really hit the ground running.
Upon realizing the importance of the agentic paradigm and the challenges to succeeding in it, many people have asked me what course I recommend.
I haven’t had a good answer.
That is, until now…
Announcing The Agentic Academy For Knowledge Work
I’m super excited to announce that I’m co-launching an Agentic paradigm program with Wyndo, the creator of The AI Maker.
Wyndo and I have become friends over the last year, and I’m particularly excited to collaborate with him because:
He runs the fastest-growing AI newsletter on Substack.
Out of everyone I know, he’s the most proactive about experimenting and mastering new AI tools as they come.
He’s a gifted explainer and teacher.
Our styles complement each other.
The program launches on Monday, June 15, at 11:00am EST, and it will include:
Community: WhatsApp community where all of your questions can be answered by Wyndo and me.
Classes: 10 90-minute classes
Mastermind: Monthly mastermind where Wyndo and I help you stay on top of the latest updates on how we’re creating things with agents.
Skills: We’ve created self-installing skills that make it easy to transfer all of your data (LinkedIn, Substack, ChatGPT, Claude.ai) into your agent OS and then create a knowledge repo.
We’ll be sharing more about it next week, but for now, I just wanted to share a teaser so you can save the date.
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