As someone who grew up in a communist country, I never thought I’d be living in America, as a successful entrepreneur, boldly creating the life I have today, but here I am.
That didn’t happen overnight. I faced immense challenges and evolved numerous times along the way, starting as an academic, then transitioning into software development, and then eventually into entrepreneurship and real estate investing.
While difficult, I strongly believe my path uniquely prepared me for life as a business owner because I was forced to constantly adapt to an unpredictable and ever changing environment. Not to mention that my early life in Russia helped me to develop a mental toughness that I don’t find in many people today. And I think that’s why I’m so quick to predict, identify, and adapt to change.
This is a critical skill that every entrepreneur needs in order to survive.
And today, I’m again adapting to a change I’ve been anticipating for a while, and now see starting to quickly unfold.
The change I’m talking about is the increasingly foundational role technology plays in business.
But I need to be clear in what I mean here—it’s not just the general use of technology. That’s already played a surface level role since the early 1990s. I’m not talking about basic software, mobile devices, and computers. What I’m talking about here is the deep integration of paradigm changing technologies that replace traditional systems, employees, and roles.
I believe this so strongly that I’ve recently started building an entirely separate business around it.
So in this article, I’m going to break down three key aspects of technology that have the potential to completely transform entire industries.
These technologies will disrupt the power dynamics that have existed for decades because the companies that adopt them will achieve a tremendous competitive advantage while those that don’t will fall behind.
Let’s get into it…
Automation streamlines your workflow
Slow, inefficient, and error prone manual processes are quickly being replaced with instant, fast, highly structured processes.
Gone are the days where a client contacts a business and staff eventually reaches out, provides information, and enters their contact info into some system for tracking and follow up.
Today, proactive entrepreneurs are leveraging systems that automate follow up to make it instant, comprehensive, and highly effective.
Here’s an example: When a prospect contacts your business, automated systems can instantly reply, providing valuable information to strike while their interest is at its peak. It can also give them the ability to schedule a call or even connect with a representative immediately while they’re most likely to close. These systems can also send a scheduled series of emails or texts to provide supplementary information, push contact info directly into your CRM, rate that prospect, and attach appropriate tags based on certain criteria and actions.
And automation doesn’t just apply to your sales processes—they can be applied to any part of your workflow.
For example, the public relations firm I’m a client of developed a particular automation that I found especially interesting and useful.
When one of their clients is interviewed by a journalist over Zoom, it triggers a series of actions that starts when that interview is first scheduled.
The calendar invite is set up with a particular format, which determines how the folder of that particular Zoom recording is named. Another element of this automation monitors the folder where these recordings are saved, and when a new recording is saved that meet its criteria, it instantly extracts the audio file from that folder, uploads it to a transcription service, and then monitors a specific email inbox looking for a notification that the transcript has been created. It then logs into the transcription service, downloads the transcript file, and emails it to the publicist’s team and the journalist, along with the video file from the interview and the source’s name, company, and URL.
This easily saves that public relations firm 30 minutes of work on each interview, and it’s completed in a matter of minutes instead of waiting for an employee to be available. And on top of the time and cost savings, it also makes that publicity infinitely more valuable to journalists because it makes their job faster and easier.
These are just a few examples, and there are an infinite number of ways to implement automation throughout your business to streamline operations, reduce costs, and provide better service.
Data provides actionable insight
There’s something to be said for making quick decisions based on intuition, but just as, if not more important, are decisions based on objective data.
Today, entrepreneurs have access to more data than ever before, and while that creates a lot of opportunities, it also comes with its own challenge, which is that it has historically been tough to process and analyze large datasets. Until recently.
With tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, it’s far easier to quickly analyze massive amounts of data in a way that was previously only available to enterprise level companies. But at the same time, that can create an entirely different set of challenges.
The key is understanding exactly what data will have the most impact in your decision making process, and strategizing exactly how to best analyze and leverage that data.
The way I typically approach this process is to identify a set of KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, that have the most impact on a particular goal, and then work backwards to find the data that influences those KPIs. This helps me to spot trends long before they start to have an impact in my business.
For example, as a real estate investor, you want to buy low, and then either hold a newly acquired property or flip it for a quick profit. So you might compile a large dataset consisting of historical property values, rent ranges, transaction volume, mortgage delinquencies, or foreclosures, and then use that data to identify buying opportunities in down markets that are likely to quickly rebound.
In some cases, you may analyze data using AI, but in many cases, it may be far simpler to analyze in a basic spreadsheet.
The key is to identify upcoming trends based on previous trends. But this requires a strong understanding of statistical analysis because it’s easy to misinterpret the data and see what you want to see. Confirmation bias is a significant risk here. If that’s not a skillset that you have, it’s smart to work with an experienced statistician, especially one who has worked in your particular industry and understands its nuance.
If you can find the right data and accurately analyze it, it will empower you to make data-driven decisions long before your competitors, giving you a powerful first-mover advantage over them.
AI creates a massive competitive advantage
Anyone who follows me on social media knows how much I love AI.
I’ve adopted this in my own businesses in multiple ways because I was able to see early on how powerful it can be when used properly. But most people are either not using it or they’re using it poorly.
Before we get into how to use it, let’s talk about how not to use it. This is critical because if you use AI in the wrong way, you’ll expend a lot of wasted effort and costs, and in many cases, actually hurt your company.
One of the most common ways I see people using AI incorrectly is for creating content. This isn’t to say that you can’t use AI to create content—I certainly use it for that, but if you’re going to use it that way, you need to ensure it clearly carries your brand voice.
You’ve likely seen plenty of posts on social media that are clearly written by AI. It’s important to remember that while using AI to create content from scratch can flood social media with your message and drive impressions up, that approach leads to content that all sounds the same. This is true in two different ways; the first is that any piece of your content will sound the same as any other piece of your content, and the second is that all of your content will sound the same as most of the content that other people are posting.
Both are near certain recipes for failure.
A better approach, though, is to use it to quickly turn your existing content, like a podcast interview, into a library of microcontent. A single 30-60 minute video podcast can quickly be turned into a few dozen video shorts that you can upload to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to drive a ton of visibility, engagement, and new followers. And since it’s literally just you speaking, there’s no risk of it being off brand. This particular tactic just eliminates a lot of the grunt work of chopping your longform content into short form content.
Another way I often see people misuse AI is taking its responses at face value.
That’s because it often has a problem with hallucination, where it makes something up because it’s prone to telling you what it thinks you want to hear. We’ve seen this play out in a big way in the legal field where attorneys have cited cases that don’t actually exist, leading to sanctions for the attorneys and creating a weaker case for their clients because the judge is now frustrated with the attorney.
When it comes to AI, I like to take former president Ronald Regan’s approach—trust but verify.
It can compile, analyze, and even offer advice on a particular topic, but you then have to confirm that everything in its response is accurate.
That being said, you also have to be careful about the information you provide to any AI tool, because once they have it, it’s no longer private. There have been multiple examples of attorneys sending a subpoena to various AI platforms to force them to provide information on a particular user’s activity. So for example, if you’re asking an AI tool for advice on a legal case, keep in mind that unlike your communication with your own attorney, none of this information is protected by attorney-client privilege.
One way I use AI on a nearly daily basis is with a custom deal analyzer that I built, where I enter the purchase price, loan details, projected rehab, and closing costs, and it instantly tells me if the deal works based on an algorithm I’ve developed that meets my personal investing criteria. Plus it even generates a custom report I can hand to lenders or JV partners. Another way I use it on a daily basis is as a Realtor, to analyze historical market data like price trends, days on market, and inventory shifts, to spot patterns before they hit the headlines.
Ultimately, the most effective ways I’ve found to leverage AI revolve around eliminating grunt work with non-sensitive data. Approach it from the mindset of “How could this information be used against me if it fell into the wrong hands.” If you do that, you’ll get the maximum benefit with the minimum exposure to risk.
I grew up in a system that punished independent thinking, then when I became an entrepreneur, I quickly learned that waiting for permission to change is how you get left behind.
The entrepreneurs who will thrive in the next decade aren’t necessarily the smartest or the best funded. They’re the ones willing to adapt before they’re forced to—the ones who treat technology as a competitive tool rather than a threat to figure out later.
The tools are here. The question is whether you’ll use them on your terms or spend the next few years watching others do it first and gobble up marketshare.