When I started running AI workshops in Austin, I made one specific choice: do it in person.
I could have built an online course. I had the audience for it. The economics would have been better on paper — no venue, no travel, unlimited seats. But I knew the people I wanted to reach — founders, operators, investors — weren't going to commit to a weekly online module. They're too busy, and honestly, they've already bought too many courses they didn't finish.
So I chose a full day in a room.
That first workshop filled up. People referred others. I've been running them every six weeks since, and they've done something unexpected: they've made me better. Staying current enough to teach a live room forces a level of preparation that producing asynch content doesn't.
But there's a bigger idea here — one I've been thinking about more as AI gets genuinely capable at creating content.
The Scarcity Shift
Here's the question worth sitting with: as AI gets better at creating content, recording courses, and handling everything asynch, what becomes scarcer?
The human being in the room.
For years, the calculus was that live presence was expensive and hard to scale. A recorded course could reach thousands; a live workshop could only reach fifty. AI flips part of that equation — it handles the scalable, asynch content layer. What's left is the live experience.
And what's scarce tends to become more valuable.
I had a conversation recently with someone who works with high-performing content creators. One of them — Onyx Singal — has an AI clone that runs all of his social content, creates his ads, and is responsible for getting people to his live events. The clone does the marketing. The human shows up for the in-person event.
His summary of the situation: the clone got everyone in the room. The human delivered the experience.
This is the model. AI handles the funnel; people pay premium for access to the real person.
What Live Does That Digital Can't
I want to be specific about what I mean, because “in person is different” can feel vague.
When you're in the same physical space as someone, several things happen that don't happen on a Zoom call or in a course:
Questions change quality. People ask things in a live room that they won't type into a chat box. Partly because they can see the room's reaction. Partly because something about the physical presence makes the question feel more real.
Ideas spark differently. When two people are literally looking at the same screen, working through the same problem, the conversation takes unexpected turns. I've seen this in workshops — someone makes an offhand observation, someone else builds on it, and suddenly the whole room is on to something none of them had thought of before. That doesn't happen in asynch.
Trust builds faster. This one is hard to quantify but easy to feel. A few hours in a room with someone does more for a relationship than months of email exchanges. The energy, the body language, the shared experience — these compound in ways that don't have a digital equivalent.
The Practical Implication
If you're building a business that involves your expertise — consulting, coaching, education, any kind of knowledge work — the live experience is the layer AI can't replicate.
That's not an argument against using AI. It's an argument for being strategic about what you protect.
Use AI to handle the content that markets you. Let it create the posts, run the sequences, produce the recordings. Let it fill the room.
But save the room for yourself.
The businesses that will do well over the next decade aren't the ones that resist AI, and they're not the ones that just automate everything either. They're the ones that use AI to scale the output layer and then show up live for the experiences that actually matter.
The premium used to be the content. The premium is becoming the presence.
If you want to see this in action, the 4-Day AI Sprint covers how to build the AI workflows that free up your time — so you can show up fully for the live experiences that create real value.
