At the end of 2025 I walked away from a decade-long ecommerce career to go all in on AI. No real plan, just time and space to be a student again.
As someone wired to be output-driven, initially I found myself getting super frustrated. I was absorbing a lot of information, but it was hard to tell whether any of it was actually leading somewhere with tangible output.
Now, I'm building things (opening terminal - wtf) that I couldn't have imagined touching six months ago sitting in a Director of Ecomm chair.
If you're an SMB owner or Ecomm founder who knows AI matters but has no idea where to start:
- Set aside even a small amount of time each week to just play with AI tools. No agenda and no ROI pressure. The foundational knowledge compounds faster than you might expect
- Find a community of people ahead of you. Paid can be worth it if it's the right room. One conversation with someone who's already solved your problem saves you weeks of bumbling around (like I did) trying to figure things out alone. I joined two Skool groups last month that gave me a lot more clarity on what to focus on.
- Accept you might not figure out a game-changing AI unlock for your biz immediately. But.... you won't find one doing nothing, either.
LASTLY - get your business foundation right first: systems, processes, documentation. Do that before layering any AI on top of it.
AI will never be worse than it is today.