Mark Said It Out Loud. Now We All Have to Deal with It.
We were recently in our quarterly session with our EOS facilitator, Mark O’Donnell, CEO of EOS Worldwide. I always walk away from time with Mark with something worth chewing on, and this last session was no different. He dropped something that’s been sitting with me ever since, and good or bad, with my team as well.
Mark has become genuinely skilled at using AI tools, across several platforms, and he’s not shy about it. He told his team directly: if he can, in two weeks, use his AI to do your job better than you do it today, then they need to go find another job. Not because he wants to replace them, but because that was his way of waking them up. The message landed. His team went from passively aware of AI to actively figuring out how to use it inside their specific roles.
I took that same energy back to my own team. I told my leaders they had two weeks. If I can sit down with Claude and outperform their function in that window, then we have a real conversation to have. So, they better start learning, and learning fast. Whether that’s using Claude’s Cowork, Claude Code, or another tool entirely, the mandate is the same: find what can be automated, or be built faster, and stop doing manually what a well-prompted AI can do in minutes.
The Reality Shift: One Person Can Replace a Team
What I keep coming back to is this: workforce planning is changing in ways that most organizations aren’t moving fast enough to keep up with. One person, with the right tools and enough context loaded in, can produce what used to take a full team.
That’s not a threat, it’s just the reality we’re operating in. The question is whether your people are building that capability or waiting to see what happens.
At IT By Design, this is exactly the work we’re doing with MSPs: building AI capability inside teams, restructuring roles, and embedding it into day-to-day operations so productivity actually scales.
The Balance: AI as a Partner, Not a Crutch
I’ll be honest, I do think about brain drain. There’s a version of this where we lean on AI so heavily that we stop developing our own thinking, and that concerns me as well. I use Claude as a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter. We go back and forth. I push back on what it gives me, I add context, I redirect. The first output is never the final output. That relationship only works if I’m bringing my own judgment to the table, and that judgment must stay sharp.
What I’m asking of my team is the same thing I’m asking of myself: use these tools to think more clearly, build content that says something, access information faster, and show up to decisions better prepared. The goal isn’t to hand the work off. The goal is to do the work at a standard that wasn’t possible before.
If you haven’t started, start this week. There are hours of free tutorials on YouTube across every major platform. Pick the tool that fits your workflow and commit to learning it properly, not just dabbling. The leaders and contributors who figure this out early aren’t going to have an advantage for long, because eventually everyone will catch up. But right now, the gap is wide.
I gave my team the two-week challenge because I needed them to feel the urgency, not just hear it. There’s a difference between knowing something is coming and actually moving because of it. Mark moved his team. I’m working on moving mine. If you haven’t had that honest conversation with your people yet, this is your nudge. Have it this week, before someone else has it for you.
