Welcome back to the Launch Key 🚀

My summer reading (and podcast) list is markedly more tech bent this year as AI dominates the news. Plus, Gary Frey invited me to be on a panel discussion in September and I’m concerned that I’ll be outdated before Labor Day!

So this week’s Launch Key is the June update for all of us thinking about AI.

Graphic learners will appreciate the TLDR of this week’s Visual Crapshoot. And a solid reminder that we are still in the early innings.

Let's get into it.

Here's the most under reported fact in tech right now: A tiny percentage of people are actually using AI.

What are you talking about Rob? ChatGPT just crossed 900 million weekly active users. Cursor has 40 million. Claude has 30 million. GitHub Copilot has 26 million. Gemini has 750 million monthly users. Stack them all up, dedupe the overlap, and you land at a number that's roughly 11% of humanity.

But while many have used a chat bot, maybe 80 million pay for access to the best models. And of those who pay, an even smaller slice use agentic tools — the autonomous coding agents, the background task runners, the full agent organizations, the stuff actually doing the work while you're sleeping.

The number of humans who use AI the way Silicon Valley talks about it might be 50 million total. On a planet of 8.1 billion.

That's the whole picture no matter what the pretty news reader is saying from your TV.

I wasn’t super early, but you’ve watched me stick a toe in the water (How to Win When Everyone Has AI, Eat Your Own Dog Food). I have a small local tech sandbox and have built a few personalized projects but now, how do I keep up?

Beside reading my daily Futurist, I spend too much time on X and listen to pods while walking our dog. I’ve always appreciated the technology optimism of Marc Andreessen and listened to his 3 hour stint on Joe Rogan (listen) last week. He thinks we’re 3 years into a multi-decade AI story. His speaking style can be overwhelming - from macro view to historical facts, but trends and big ideas come tumbling out almost every time he speaks.

The a16z co-founder can pick up the phone and reach literally anyone on the planet for answers. But he told Rogan that since late 2025, he gets better answers from AI than from experts in his personal contacts. He claimed 99% of the time!

I found this so shocking that I listened to it twice. One of the most networked humans in tech now trusts the machine over his Rolodex.

Recently there has been pushback on the datacenters for future AI. Kevin O’Leary actually dug into IRS filings of the organizations protesting his Utah data center project to find Chinese backing. John Solomon America's AI infrastructure (listen) and David Friedberg both flagged the same pattern on their respective shows. All of which means the investment absolutely can not slow down if we want to stay in the lead.

I also listened to Ara Kharazian, Lead Economist at Ramp, about what real business spending data says about AI adoption. He gave a level-headed explanation of why the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative is overblown and how companies are actually buying and deploying AI tools.

"Why AI Isn't Killing SaaS Yet" (listen). Remember the doomers take — that AI agents were going to eat every software business? Eighteen months later, SaaS revenue is fine. Retention is fine. New logos are fine. The story we were sold by the chattering class was wrong. Again.

Finally, there is growing data that shows many of the tech layoffs used AI as the excuse when the reality was employee bloat. The facts show that there are more tech job openings today than 3 years ago. CEO’s including Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have softened their earlier job destruction storyline. And Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon now says the fears of mass unemployment are ‘overblown.’

Stack this insight, the three pods plus actual user numbers and a picture comes into focus that neither the doomers nor the hypers want to admit:

That's not a story about being too late. That's a story about a wide-open window.

ChatGPT added 100 million weekly users in the four months between October and February. The curve isn't flattening. It's accelerating. But raw adoption and useful adoption are not the same thing.

A 26-year-old asks an AI to design a customer renewal motion. They get a textbook answer they can't critically evaluate. They don't know which parts are generic, which parts are wrong, which parts will get the deal killed in week three by a procurement department they've never dealt with.

You do.

You ask the same question and you instantly spot the bad assumptions. You know which industries hate that pricing structure. You know what the buyer's CFO will say. You've seen this movie a hundred times.

The AI does the hands-on work. Your judgment steers it. That's the combination quietly running away from the rest of the market right now.

Andreessen is in the tiny slice of humanity that uses these tools constantly. Not because he's young or codes. But because he knows how to question an answer.

None of us have Andreessen’s technical chops, but we know how to question an answer too. We've been doing it in conference rooms for thirty years.

Yes, the pushback is real.

Half the country is now souring on AI. The All-In guys spent a whole segment last week on why. The layoffs are real. The anti-human concerns are real. The people worried about their grandkids’ jobs have a point.

But every transformative technology had this moment. The horses-to-cars moment. The craftsman-to-factory moment. The newspapers-to-internet moment. The people who adapted and built lives around the new tools moved ahead. The people who held out on principle didn't.

You're allowed to use a tool you're skeptical of. Skepticism is the whole reason your judgment is worth more than the kid’s.

The doomers got the threat wrong. The threat isn't that AI replaces experienced people. The threat is that the overwhelming majority of experienced people never bother to learn it — and leave the field to the small group who do.

The hype take got the timeline wrong. This isn't flipping in 18 months. It's compounding quietly over the next decade. The people who start now have an exponential head start over the ones who panic into it in 2029. I personally think many of the great companies of the next decade will have a 2026 start date.

And the geopolitics — like them or not — ensure the rails keep getting built. Trump rescinded the AI executive order last week. Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI's co-founders, just jumped to Anthropic. Anthropic itself is reportedly heading to its first profitable quarter (insane run-rate chart below). Investment in compute and energy is exploding. The money is telling you where the puck is going.

First, upgrade to a paid model. Then, pick one workflow. One.

The thing you redo every Monday. The proposal templates, the pre-meeting research, the vendor follow-ups, the analysis you run before every decision.

Spend one hour teaching an AI to do it alongside you. Not to replace you. To work the keyboard while you steer.

That's how you join the small slice of humanity actually getting leverage from all this. Not by just listening to another podcast or reading another think piece. By actually using the tool on a real problem you already know cold. If you’re hung up on tools, start here.

You've spent decades building the judgment that makes this thing actually work.

You're not late.

You're early in a way that most of the planet isn't.

Now go launch something 🚀

Moda's viral launch hit 4.4 million views in two days. Tens of thousands of professionals signed up. Startups, agencies, forward-thinking brands and top firms are now using Moda to create brand-aligned slides, ad creative, reports, social carousels and more.

Most AI tools tend to create what we call "AI slop": repetitions of the same colors, layouts and fonts. And when you try to fix it, you get stuck in a loop of re-prompting.

Moda is different. Drop in your website URL, and Moda learns your brand from the ground up: your colors, your fonts, your visual language. Then it helps you generate pro-quality slides, docs, and marketing assets. 

The best part? Every layer is fully editable on a real canvas, and exports to powerpoint, PDF and more.

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Are you looking for a great business book for your Summer reading? Runnin' Down a Dream is Bill Gurley's debut book, nearly a decade in the making, expanding on a viral college talk into a full-length argument for deliberate, curiosity-driven career design. I’ve had a curiosity-driven career and it is a fantastic read - perfect for a late-career professional contemplating change.

The May 22 All-in podcast E274 is worth your time too. SpaceX, Nvidia, and why America turned on AI. Pay particular attention to David Friedberg’s Copernican Revolution analogy. He compares the current AI backlash to how disorienting heliocentrism was for the medieval mind: it knocked humans out of the center of the universe, and the institutions built on that assumption fought it hard. His point is that AI does something similar — it isn't human-centric, and that's psychologically destabilizing for a lot of people. He calls it "almost anti-humanist."

Three segments stand out for our tribe:

🤖 AI Report : 400,000+ business leaders (and teams at IBM, AWS & Zapier) start their day with The AI Report. 5 minutes. Plain English. No hype.

📕 MGMT Playbook : Practical management insights straight to your inbox every Wednesday.

🔖 The StartUp Marketing Newsletter : Your cheat sheet for marketing news, insights & tips tailored for the startup space.

🗃 Dealroom Business Success Uncovered : Learn directly from billionaire entrepreneurs on how to grow a business. Join a community of 2,000+ innovators.