Every real jump I’ve made with AI has come from a conversation, not a course. Not a YouTube deep-dive, not a whitepaper, not a bookmarked article I told myself I’d read later. A conversation. Usually over coffee, sometimes over Teams, almost always with someone who’d already done the thing I was still circling. I’ve stopped treating that as a coincidence.
The shortcut nobody uses
There’s a strange reluctance to ask for help with AI. People will spend three weekends wrestling with prompts, rebuilding the same agent four times, watching another hour of tutorials — before they’ll send one message to someone who has already solved the problem.
I don’t know why we do this. Maybe it feels like cheating. Maybe we think we have to earn it the hard way. But the person two steps ahead of you isn’t guarding anything. In my experience, they’re usually thrilled someone asked.
Open your phone right now. Scroll through LinkedIn. Flick through your contacts. There will be one or two names who are visibly doing more interesting work with AI than you are. Send them a message today. Not next week. Today.
Trade something for their time
If the person you want to learn from is properly ahead — running real projects, shipping real results — their time is the scarce resource. So offer to pay for it. Offer to buy them lunch. Offer the hour the way you’d pay any other professional.
Most people will wave the money away and take the coffee. A few will charge you, and they’ll be worth every cent. What you’re really buying is a compressed version of their last twelve months of learning — the dead ends, the tools they quietly stopped using, the one prompt pattern that changed everything for them. You don’t get that from a blog.
Even if nobody ever takes your money, the offer changes the tone of the conversation. You’ve signalled you take their experience seriously. People respond to that.
Make it a ritual
One of the best things I’ve locked into my week is a small AI lunch. Five of us, give or take, turning up to compare notes on what we’re actually doing — what we built, what broke, what surprised us, what we’re quietly worried about. No agenda, no slides.
A year of those lunches is worth more than any conference I’ve been to. Cadence matters. A monthly catch-up drifts to quarterly. A weekly one stays locked in. You start showing up with something to share because you know the others will.
You don’t need five people. Start with two. Pick a day, pick a cafe, and put it in the calendar on repeat.
The real edge
The tools are mostly the same for everyone now. Access isn’t the differentiator it was twelve months ago. What separates the people genuinely getting somewhere with AI from the people still reading about it is the circle they’ve built around themselves.
Assemble that circle on purpose. Proximity really is power — and the people you sit next to, even on a call, will shape how far you go.
CIAOPS 