A few weeks ago, Andrej Karpathy sat down with Sequoia Capital's Stephanie Zhan at their AI Ascent 2026 event and talked about the shift happening in how software gets built. Karpathy is one of the people who helped build modern AI. He co-founded OpenAI, led AI at Tesla, and last year gave the industry the term "vibe coding." He's not a commentator. He builds things.

During the conversation, he quoted a line he'd seen online that he said he keeps coming back to every other day:

"You can outsource your thinking. You cannot outsource your understanding."

That one sentence is the answer to the question I've been hearing from a lot of you since this series started: so what should I actually do?

AI can execute. It can draft, build, research, write, calculate, and produce at a speed no human can match. What it cannot do is understand whether what it produced is right, appropriate, safe, on-target, or worth doing in the first place. That understanding is yours. It's also the most valuable thing your business sells, whether you've framed it that way or not.

The website test

Vervology develops websites. That's a business I know well. And the perception right now is that everyone can build a website with ChatGPT.

They're not wrong. You can.

But is it right? Is it secure? Where are you hosting it? How do you maintain it when something breaks? How do you fix it when the platform changes? Is it on brand? Does it convert visitors into customers? Does it block bad bots and allow the good ones? Is it structured so Google can read it properly? Does it comply with accessibility standards? Does it handle data the way the law requires?

Those questions are not about building the website. They're about understanding what a website needs to be. The building is the easy part now. The understanding of what to build, and whether what you built is actually correct, is where the value lives.

Every single person reading this has their own version of this.

If you're an accountant, your client can file their taxes with TurboTax. They can also miss a deduction that costs them thousands because the software didn't know to ask the right question about their situation. You would have.

If you're a contractor, your client can watch a YouTube video and renovate their own bathroom. They can also fail the inspection because they didn't know the code requirements in their county. You would have.

If you're a designer, your client can build a logo in Canva in twenty minutes. They can also end up looking like four other businesses in the same town because the tool doesn't know the local market. You would have.

The execution is outsourceable. The understanding is not. That's the line.

Map the journey before you pick the tool

This is something I come back to all the time, and it matters more now than it ever has.

Before you ask "what AI tool should I use?" ask a better question: what does my customer's journey look like from start to finish?

Where do they first hear about you? What makes them want to learn more? What do they experience when they land on your site? Is it easy for them to understand what you offer and why it matters? What's the next step you want them to take? How do you follow up? How do you deliver? How do you support them after the sale? And how do you bring them back?

When you map that out, the right AI use cases fall out of it naturally. You don't need someone to tell you which tool to buy. You need to understand your own customer journey well enough to see where the gaps are. AI fills gaps. It doesn't draw the map.

If you skip the map and go straight to tools, you'll buy things that don't fit anything. I see this constantly.

Own what's yours

This one runs through everything I write and everything I advise on because it's the single most important strategic decision a small business owner makes, and most don't think of it as a decision at all.

Your audience. Your customer list. Your email list. Your website. Your data. Your content. These are yours. No algorithm decides whether your email gets delivered. No platform change can wipe out your subscriber list overnight.

AI tools come and go. Platforms change their terms, their pricing, their algorithms, their entire business model. The things you own are what you build compound returns on. Everything else is rented.

When you're thinking about where AI fits in your business, start with the things you own and ask how AI can make them stronger. Not how AI can replace them. Not how AI can move them onto someone else's platform. How AI makes your owned assets more valuable.

That's the frame. That's the strategy. Tools serve the journey. The journey is yours. The understanding is yours. Everything else is execution, and execution is getting cheaper every day.

Karpathy was talking about software engineers. But the principle is universal.

The businesses that win the next few years will not be the ones that used the most AI. They'll be the ones whose owners understood their business well enough to direct AI toward the right problems. Not the flashiest problems. Not the most automated problems. The right ones.

For a small business, that understanding is your entire competitive advantage. The big companies are in an arms race to cut humans out (I covered this in the last post). Your move is the opposite. Keep the understanding in. Use AI to extend what you can do with it. Don't use AI to replace the thing that makes you worth hiring.

You can outsource your thinking. You cannot outsource your understanding.

Two moves.

First, write down the five things you understand about your business, your market, or your customers that a new competitor with AI couldn't figure out in a weekend. That's your list of things that are not outsourceable. Protect them. Invest in them. Build your positioning around them.

Second, look at everything else you spend time on and ask: could AI do this part while I stay in charge of the outcome? If yes, that's where AI goes. Not in the understanding. In the execution underneath it.

The next post is the last in this series, and it gets specific. Three places to start putting AI to work in your business this week, without touching the things that make you valuable.

If you're reading this and thinking "I know what I understand about my business, but I've never written it down or built my positioning around it," hit reply and tell me what it is. I'll tell you whether you're sitting on something worth building around or whether you need to dig deeper.

Best

Jono