When inbound marketing first started taking hold in the 2000s, there was this sense that the ground was shifting under our feet. What people had learned—in college degrees and over long careers—no longer mapped cleanly to the new reality. We had to unlearn old habits, rethink fundamentals, and reorient how we worked.
It was exciting. And it was really overwhelming.
That’s what this AI moment feels like today. We’re being told—sometimes subtly, sometimes a bit too loudly—that the way we’ve always done things is about to change. There’s a thousand new tools and some strange new terminology. And once again, it feels like we’re confronted with a million things we’re supposed to learn on top of the million things we already have to do.
The difference is this time, we have AI to teach us.
No matter your role, your background, or your technical confidence, AI has quietly become one of the most powerful learning tools you’ll ever have access to. Not because it gives you shortcuts, not because it's perfect, but because it gives you something most of us have never had before: A patient, personalized, always-available tutor who will explain things six different ways until you get it.
Let’s unpack what that opportunity looks like, and how you can use AI to learn new skills.
One of the most exciting things about AI is how it makes learning available to more people. The knowledge has always been out there, but it hasn't always been easy to find a way to access it.
Personally, I think of AI as my own private tutor. When I was younger, I struggled with math. I tended to get it in class, and then when I got home to do homework, I completely forgot where to begin. I wished I had someone beside me I could pepper with questions: “I don’t get this part.” "I forgot the next step." “Okay, I understand step three, but how does step four work?” “Why does this formula behave like this?”
That’s exactly what AI gives me now. I can interrogate it endlessly. I can stop it mid-explanation and say, “I don’t get that—explain it in a different way.” It lowers the barrier to entry in areas I wouldn’t naturally feel confident in. And I use it everywhere:
I’ve built agents on Agent.ai because I knew if I got it wrong, I could use AI to coach me through what actions in the tool to adjust. I didn't feel the worry of sinking too much time into something that was above my pay grade, knowing I had access to AI to help me if I got stuck.
I’ve used AI to troubleshoot software with more features than I can untangle on my own—or that simply isn’t behaving how I expect. Again, I don't really like trying out new tools because it feels like I'll lose a lot of time to tinkering with something that probably won't make my life any easier. But when I can tell AI what I want out of the tool, and ask it to show me how to get there, the path to my end goal is more direct than it has ever been.
I’ve used it as a product marketing right-hand. The last time I jumped into a fresh HubSpot instance, I turned the AI into a customized, interactive product tutorial for my specific goals. It got me up and running 10X faster than I would have on my own.
I’m (clearly) not an IT person, but last week I used AI to diagnose and fix a poor Wi-Fi connection faster than my provider could send someone out.
AI isn’t perfect. It gets things wrong. But it gets you started in places you otherwise wouldn’t start at all. And that matters, because starting is the hardest part of learning anything new.
Some people say AI can help you start an entirely new career path. (People make a lot of really big claims about what AI can do.) While I do think that claim is true, it doesn’t have to be that deep. Sometimes all you need is help over the little humps: the annoyances, the tools you wish you understood, the workflows you know could be better but don’t know how to improve. And it can teach you in the way your brain works, not the way the static documentation is written or using vocabulary you don't understand.
Everyone learns differently. AI can explain the same concept in different ways until it clicks. It can use analogies, diagrams, rephrase things, whatever works for you.
Many people don’t ask questions publicly because they don’t want to look stupid. AI doesn’t care. Go ahead and ask.
You can tell AI to explain something as if you’re a beginner, PhD level, or anything in between. And if the first explanation is too basic or advanced, you can ask it to try again at a different level.
You can ask AI to quiz you, create practice exercises, check your work, or create real-world scenarios to interrogate.
You don’t have to wait to schedule a meeting with a subject matter expert. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still meet with an expert—I recently used AI to teach me more about AEO in the weeks leading up to a meeting with an actual expert. But because of the foundational learning I’d already done with AI, our time together was more productive.
If you want to start using AI to get better at something, you can just go start—and I hope you already feel emboldened to do that. But if you want to start making this more of a habit, here’s a framework you can follow.
Say, “I want to be able to [blank].” Make the skill concrete.
“I want to understand how to use HubSpot workflows.”
“I want to troubleshoot basic issues on my Mac without going to IT.”
“I want to learn enough about marketing analytics to make better decisions.”
“I want to learn the principles of effective slide design.”
Then tell AI, “Help me learn X. Assume I’m a beginner, and ask me any clarifying questions you need answers to before you start teaching. I want to learn 1) the core components of the skill; 2) which parts I should learn first, second, third, and beyond; 3) the mistakes beginners usually make.”
Use the roadmap AI lays out for you to start learning small chunks of information on the topic you’re interested in—in the right order, at your pace.
This is where the growth happens. Use AI like your personal tutor.
Ask questions nonstop.
Say “Before we move on, I don’t get this part, explain it differently.”
Say, “I still don’t get it ... specifically, why you’re saying [this]?”
Say, “Show me an example from X industry.”
Say, “Who are some of the people that are really good at this who have free educational materials?”
Say, “Where are you getting this information from?”
Say, “Show me how to do this inside X tool.”
Say, "Is this the best tool for me to do this in, or should I be using something else?"
Say, “Walk me through the next step, but don’t move any further until I confirm I understand.”
The more interaction, the faster you learn.
Take what you learned and try it in the real world. Build the automation, troubleshoot your router, draft a formula, and see if it works. When something doesn’t work, tell AI exactly what happened:
I expected A, but got B. Here’s what it looks like. Why did this happen?
This button isn’t where your instructions say it is. Can you help me find it?
The tool gives me an error message—here’s what it says. Can you explain why that happened, and walk me through a fix?
This loop—try, fail, ask, adjust—is how people actually learn.
I’m sure at some point today you’ll identify something that’s slowing you down or that you're curious about. Make it a point to use AI to talk through it, experiment, and let it teach you in the way your brain understands. The point isn’t to actually become a data scientist or a designer or whatever it is you’re using AI to learn. The point is to become more capable, more confident, and more in control of your own growth.