Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.
GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️
A few weeks ago, I watched a 19-year-old make smarter strategic decisions than most executives twice her age. She wasn’t improvising. She wasn’t just lucky. She was thinking with AI, treating it like a partner, not a novelty.
When she received a job offer, she didn’t call a mentor or scribble a pros and cons list. She turned to her AI thread.
“Remember my career goals from our last chat? I just got this job offer. Walk me through our decision framework and help me see if it fits my five-year plan.”
This wasn’t a one-off prompt. It was an ongoing relationship with a system that understood her goals, had memory, and could help her navigate decisions with clarity. She wasn’t using ChatGPT like a smarter Google. She was leveraging it as a cognitive collaborator.
And here’s what makes this even more important: she’s not the exception. She’s the new normal.
Most People Are Still Playing With Prompts
Executives, managers, and even some founders are still stuck in the clever prompt phase. They spend hours asking the same questions in slightly different ways, hoping to unlock value. They write AI-generated emails that sound like everyone else. They talk about “AI integration” like it’s a software feature and not a system-wide shift.
Meanwhile, the next generation is quietly building infrastructure: memory layers, context loops, and workflows that evolve over time. They’ve internalized something most people haven’t, that AI is no longer about tasks. It’s about systems to learn and adapt.
They’re not asking ChatGPT to write a blog post. They’re training agents to understand their strategy, voice, and goals, then execute accordingly.
This is what it means to be AI-native.
The Playing Field Didn’t Level. It Tilted.
The cost of high-performing AI has plummeted. What once required enterprise budgets is now accessible to anyone with a laptop and curiosity. Capabilities that would’ve taken a product team a month to build are now plug-and-play.
And while some leaders are still in back-to-back meetings deciding whether to “test Gemini or Claude,” this new generation is vibe coding new tools and shipping agents that learn, adapt, and execute in real time.
They aren’t just moving faster. They’re operating on a completely different plane.
So What Happens Next?
Most companies are still making the same three mistakes:
- They type the same prompts repeatedly, never building memory or learning from the output.
- Their brand voice is trapped in a slide deck no one uses instead of being embedded into an AI system that applies it everywhere.
- They automate the wrong things: delegating creative work while manually managing the tedious stuff.
Meanwhile, AI-native companies are designing workflows where humans do what only humans can: bring judgment, creativity, and taste. Everything else gets offloaded to agents that operate 24/7, learn as they go, and scale with zero additional headcount.
This isn’t science fiction. I’ve helped teams double their marketing output without hiring a single new person just by installing agentic workflows that actually work.
You’re Not (Just) Competing With AI. You’re Competing With Those Who’ve Mastered It
This new generation isn’t waiting for permission. They aren’t asking how to get started. They’re already building, and what they’re building will replace the old way of doing things.
The good news? You can still catch up. But it means letting go of the old frameworks and learning to operate in the new one.
It means designing systems that think, not just using tools that respond.
If you want to start building smarter, faster, and without code, check out my Vibe Coding course.
It’s how I go from idea to working product in 20 minutes, and how you can too.
Talk soon,
Pete “Think With AI” Sena
Please take a second and hit the FWD button ▶️, to share this email with your favorite growth-obsessed peer. I want to inspire 1 million awesome minds like you.
