A cat and mouse game
What stayed with me was how fast all of this is changing. We all know AI is moving quickly, but seeing it up close drove home just how quickly.
It's a cat and mouse game. Someone builds a tool to get your website or LinkedIn content to show up first, then the other guys build their own tools to do the same, and it goes back and forth. That's not a knock on the tools. It's the name of the game, and our community needs to stay on top of it.
Everyone has the same tools
The adoption numbers show how crowded that race is. Stanford HAI's 2025 AI Index reported that the share of survey respondents whose organizations use AI jumped to 78 percent in 2024, up from 55 percent the year before. Those using generative AI in at least one business function more than doubled, from 33 percent to 71 percent.
When nearly everyone has the same tools, the tools alone stop being an advantage.
What doesn't change
The other thing I left with was that the human side of business, the part I emphasize with networking, talking with people, and asking for referrals and introductions, doesn't look like it will ever change. That's how business has been done for thousands of years.
Trust still travels through people. Nielsen's 2021 Trust in Advertising Study, an online survey of more than 40,000 consumers around the world, found that 88 percent trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel.
Regardless of what AI does, I think most people will keep preferring to do business with people they've met, like, trust and have a relationship with.
The anchor
So even though the presentation was overwhelming, I left it feeling like I'm approaching this the right way. There is an anchor amid this storm, and it's human relationships.
That's why my LinkedIn networking service is run by a real person, not an AI agent. If you want to talk about it, book a networking chat.