The simplest explanation for why everyone's so excited about AI

July 24, 2025

When it comes to AI, people are often in one of two camps:

1. They're freaking out about AI and it's capabilities
2. They can't understand why people are doing that

Here's my simple explanation for why AI is so different, and exciting, and why so many people and businesses are losing their minds trying to adopt it.

The key is to stop thinking about the tech. Zoom out and think about one simple phrase...

AI lets you do way more stuff.

That's it.

You're a grandma. You're a CEO. You're an employee. You have 10,000 employees. You run a multi-billion dollar company. You're doing a startup. You're a developer. You're an artist. You run a church.

Doesn't matter.

Regardless of who you are and what you do, AI can help because it's just more eyes and hands. Could you do more if you had ten, or a thousand, or a million more people to help you? Of course you could.

You might be inclined to say that this is the case for all technology. And that's true, but the difference is that previous technologies weren't autonomous. They hadn't read millions of books, and they couldn't be given random, open-ended tasks which they then use various tools to go and accomplish on their own.

In other words, most tech is tooling that humans use to do work, whereas AI is tech that can do work itself.

That's not a different game. It's a completely different sport.

So what is that worth to a business? To an individual. To a city. To a government. To a country. To a planet. To be able to outright magnify the amount of work that can get done?

Trillions of dollars, it turns out.

So, don't overthink it.

AI is just tech that lets people do way more stuff.