A friend reached out a while back looking for a marketing internship for his son. I had nothing but bad news. Every company and university I’m involved with has either eliminated or sharply cut their intern programs.
The reason is the same one every time now. AI.
That conversation stuck with me, because the intern slot used to be where you proved you could do the work. A lot of that entry-level work is exactly what a marketer with the right AI workflow now knocks out in an afternoon. The bottom rung of the ladder didn’t move. It got pulled up.
You can read that as doom. I read it as a signal about where to put your time.
You don’t have to love AI. You do have to be fluent.
Maybe you’re an AI skeptic. Maybe you just haven’t learned to prompt in a way that gives you back anything useful. Either reaction is fair. Neither one slows the technology down.
Here’s the part I actually believe, after running this stack across client work and my own content every day. The gap isn’t between people who are “good at AI” and people who aren’t. It’s between people who’ve built a few small habits and people who keep treating every AI session like the first one. The habits are learnable in less time than you’d guess.
The smallest bet that pays: 30 minutes a week
I’m not going to tell you to overhaul your week. I’m going to tell you to block thirty minutes, once a week, and spend it getting better at one thing: searching and asking questions with AI instead of around it.
You search dozens of times a day already. Email threads, docs, the open web, your own files. Most people do it the way they did in 2015, then paste the answer into a chat tool as an afterthought. Flip the order. Start with the question, let the model do the first pass of finding and framing, and you compress an hour of digging into a few minutes. In my own work that shift has been the single biggest time-saver, and it took far less practice than I expected to make it stick.
Thirty minutes a week is cheap insurance against being the person who still does it the slow way while a chunk of your peers quietly does it the fast way.
Start with the guide, not a course
I wrote a short, no-fluff walkthrough of how I actually use AI for search. No theory, no hype, just the moves I run most days.
Get it free here: The No BS Guide to Using AI for Search
Work through it in one of your thirty-minute blocks. It’s built to be applied the same day, not filed away.
One habit from it that I’ll give you up front: stop typing into AI and start talking to it. I dictate to Gmail, Slack, docs, and my notes at well over 100 words a minute now, and most of that runs straight into a model. Talking out a messy first draft of a question gets me a far better answer than the tidy one-liner I’d have typed. It’s a tiny change in input that changes the quality of everything downstream.
Searching with AI is only half the skill
Getting fluent at using AI to find things is one side of the coin. The other side, the one that matters more every quarter, is making sure your own work shows up when other people ask AI those same questions.
When a prospect asks ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini for a recommendation in your category, you are either in that answer or you aren’t. That’s a craft of its own, and it’s where I spend a lot of my time now. If that’s the part you want to go deeper on, start with my guide to generative engine optimization, and the broader AI marketing hub for how the pieces fit together.
But you don’t need that yet to get value this week. Searching better comes first. The rest builds on it.
The future isn’t waiting
Block the thirty minutes. Open the guide. Pick one habit and use it tomorrow. That’s the whole assignment.
“Don’t count the days, make the days count.” That line gets quoted a lot. The version I’d add: don’t count the AI tools either. Count the hours you get back.
Get the next move before everyone else does
I send two emails a week breaking down a single AI-for-search or AI-visibility habit you can use the same day, drawn from what’s actually working in my own marketing. No tool dumps, no hype cycle, just the next thing worth thirty minutes of your time. Subscribe free and start with the search guide above.