May 18, 2026

The First Time in My Career That Experience Is Actually the Advantage in Technology

2:54

I was talking to a young woman recently who is just getting into marketing. Smart, excited, full of energy. Great attitude. Exactly the kind of person you love to see coming into this industry.

I asked her if she used Claude.

She had never heard of it.

I pulled it up right there and showed her what it could do. She was blown away.

I walked away from that conversation thinking about something I've never experienced before in my career. Every major technology wave I've lived through, the youth were the first movers. They figured it out faster, adopted it earlier, and left the rest of us scrambling to catch up. That was true with the internet. With social media. With mobile. With every platform shift I've watched.

AI is different. And the reason it's different is worth paying attention to.

Context is the new competitive advantage.

The most powerful thing you can bring to AI is not technical skill. It is not knowing how to code or understanding how large language models work. It is context. Perspective. Pattern recognition built from decades of real experience in the actual world.

When you sit down with Claude and you have 20 years of experience raising capital, managing a team, building a company, losing clients, winning clients, making decisions under pressure, you know what to ask. You know what good looks like. You can recognize when the output is right and when it is off. You can push it further because you know what further looks like.

A 22-year-old starting in marketing is going to be great with AI. I have no doubt about that. The youth always catch up, and they will here too.

But right now, there is a window. And in that window, the person who has done the work, lived through the cycles, built up real judgment and real knowledge, and actually uses AI, that person is almost unfair to compete against.

Your experience is the prompt. Everything you know, everything you've seen, every mistake you've made and learned from, all of it becomes the input that makes AI smarter in your hands than in anyone else's.

That is a remarkable thing. In most technology shifts, experience was a liability. It made people resistant to change, slow to adopt, stuck in old ways. AI flips that entirely. Experience is the asset. The more you have, the more powerful the tool becomes.

The young woman I talked to is going to figure this out. She will learn Claude and every tool that comes after it, and she will do great things with them.

But the experienced professional who picks this up now, who leans in, who starts using it today, has a head start that is genuinely rare. In my career, I have never said that about a technology shift before.

Don't use it at your own peril.

Gui Costin is the Founder and CEO of Dakota, and the author of Be Kind and The Dakota Way. Connect with him at guicostin.com.