The Brutal Math of Being Late

By Libbie Ray | Founder, Connected Apps | Director, Connected Event Group

Matt Shumer's viral post about AI has racked up over 80 million views this week. If you haven't read it, here's the short version of the 5,000-word essay titled "Something Big Is Happening". Shumer argues that AI can now do his job as a software engineer better than he can. He warned that what happened to tech workers over the past year is about to happen to everyone else.

The post went everywhere—CNBC, CBS, Fortune, Bloomberg. It terrified people. Shumer himself later said if he'd known how viral it would go, he'd have rewritten parts of it.

He's directionally right. But there's something he didn't say explicitly that I think SME owners need to hear:

"You have a brief window where being early is a massive competitive advantage. That window is closing fast."

Here's what's happening right now, while you're reading this:

Somewhere, one of your competitors just spent an hour with AI and automated a process that used to take their team three days. They didn't hire a consultant. They didn't spend thousands on new software. They just described what they needed and the AI built it.

Somewhere, a business owner in your industry just used AI to analyse six months of customer data and found a pattern their accountant missed. They're now targeting a segment you didn't know existed.

Somewhere, a small team just built a custom app for their specific workflow in an afternoon. Not a templated solution. Not a compromise. Exactly what they needed.

And somewhere, a business coach is telling their clients to ignore AI because "it's not ready yet" or "your industry is different." Those clients are about to get left behind.

Why Are We Getting This Wrong

I need to be blunt about something: a lot of the advice SMEs are getting right now is dangerously outdated.

Business coaches and consultants who haven't personally used the latest AI models are still operating on information from 2023 or early 2024. They tried ChatGPT once, it gave them a mediocre answer, and they dismissed it. They're now confidently telling their clients that AI is "overhyped" or "not ready for your business."

That advice was maybe defensible a year ago. Today, it's malpractice.

The models released in the past few months—including those that dropped on February 5th this year—are unrecognisable from what existed six months ago. The gap between what the free version can do and what the paid version can do is enormous. And the gap between someone who uses it casually versus someone who uses it seriously is even bigger.

If your coach or consultant isn't using AI daily in their own work, they cannot give you accurate advice about what it can do for yours. Full stop.

The Real Opportunity (And It's Not What You Think)

Everyone is talking about AI replacing jobs. That's the scary headline. It's what made Shumer's post go viral—the fear factor. But critics, including AI researchers and journalists at Fortune and Bloomberg, have pushed back hard. Gary Marcus, a leading AI researcher, called the post "weaponised hype." Others pointed out that Shumer's timeline is likely too aggressive and that the real bottleneck isn't the technology—it's organisational change, the complexity of real-world jobs, and the regulatory friction that slows adoption.

They're right about the nuance. But for SMEs, the real story is different anyway.

"AI is the great equaliser."

For the first time in history, a small business can have capabilities that used to require enterprise budgets. You can now build custom software for your specific workflow without hiring developers. You can analyse data at a level that used to require a team of analysts. You can create marketing content, designs, and campaigns that used to need an agency. You can automate processes that used to require additional staff. You can get expert-level advice on demand, 24/7, for $20 a month.

The playing field just got levelled. But only for the people who move fast.

Do We Have Exactly Six Months to Get This Right?

Not everything Shumer predicted will happen on his timeline. The full automation of every knowledge worker's job isn't arriving next quarter. But the direction is undeniable.

Right now, most businesses are still ignoring this. Your competitors are still doing things the old way. The people in your industry are still paying for bloated software they don't need. They're still spending hours on tasks that could be automated.

"Are we in the six-month SME window for action?"

The person who walks into a client meeting six months from now and says "I used AI to do this analysis in an hour instead of a week" is going to win that business. The SME that builds custom tools for their specific needs while their competitors are still wrestling with generic software is going to dominate.

But that window won't stay open. Once everyone figures it out—and they will—the advantage disappears. Being early matters. Being six months early might be worth years of traditional competitive advantage.

What "Starting" Actually Looks Like

I'm not telling you to drop everything and become an AI expert. I know us SMEs are time poor but think of the time you will save in the future, the risk of doing nothing. All I'm asking you to start experimenting, right now, with real urgency.

Here's what that actually means:

Week 1: Get the right tools. Sign up for ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro. It's $20–30 a month. Not the free version. The paid version. The landscape shifts every few months, so make sure you're using the latest model available—right now that means the February 2026 releases. The gap between free and paid is enormous.

Week 2: Push it into real work. Don't just ask it questions. Give it actual tasks from your business. Feed it a messy spreadsheet and ask it to find insights. Give it a process you do manually and ask it to automate it. Paste in customer feedback and ask it to find patterns. The goal is to see what it can actually handle, not what you think it can handle.

Week 3: Document one workflow. Pick the most repetitive, time-consuming thing you or your team does. Write down every step. Then ask AI how to automate or streamline it. You'll be shocked at what's possible.

Week 4: Build something. Describe a tool you wish existed for your business. A simple tracker. A custom calculator. A workflow automation. Describe it to AI and see what happens. It won't be perfect on the first try. Iterate. Refine. Learn.

Month 2 onwards: Make it a habit. Spend one hour a day experimenting. Every single day. Try new things. Push boundaries. See what breaks. This is how you build the muscle of adapting, which is the only durable advantage in a world that's changing this fast.

The Hard Truth About Waiting

I know what some of you are thinking: "I'll wait until this settles down. I'll let others figure it out first. I'll adopt it when it's more mature."

That's a losing strategy.

By the time this "settles down," the businesses that started early will have built custom systems, automated their workflows, and developed capabilities you can't catch up to. They'll be operating at a speed and efficiency you can't match without starting from scratch.

And here's the thing nobody's saying out loud: AI is improving so fast that waiting doesn't even give you better tools. It just means you're further behind when you finally start.

Find Your Starting Point

You don't need to understand the technology. You don't need to become a prompt engineer. You don't need to take a course.

You just need to start.

Pick one problem in your business. One frustrating, repetitive, time-consuming thing. Describe it to AI. See what happens. Then try another. And another.

The businesses that will win over the next few years aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the fanciest consultants. They're the ones that started experimenting in 2026, while everyone else was still debating whether this was real.

The Ground is Shaking

Shumer's post terrified 80 million people. Some of that fear is warranted. Some of it is hype. The truth, as always, is somewhere in between.

But here's what isn't in question: the capability is real, the trajectory is clear, and the businesses that figure this out early will have an advantage that's very difficult to close.

The door is open. The question is whether you're going to walk through it while there's still an advantage to being early, or whether you're going to wait until you're forced through it by competitors who didn't hesitate.

"Is our window for taking advantage six months?"

If this resonated, share it with another SME owner who needs to hear it.