How to Actually Use AI in 2026

About this video

Dan Martell lists 15 pieces of popular AI advice he says will hurt businesses, and gives a replacement for each. He argues against firing your team for AI agents, automating everything immediately, letting AI handle all customer service, not learning how AI works, building everything with AI from day one, building strategy around the latest AI, letting AI make all business decisions, replacing all brainstorming with AI, feeding AI as much data as possible, leaving AI to IT, starting by picking the coolest tools, using only one AI tool, using every new tool, copy-pasting other people’s prompts, and assuming AI use alone gives a competitive advantage. Instead he advises using AI as a co-pilot that makes the team better, fixing a process manually first — citing Elon Musk’s Model 3 production line — then automating the biggest bottlenecks, keeping humans on human touch points while AI handles simple repetitive questions, and learning AI fundamentals. He says to focus on problems that have existed for years, citing Jeff Bezos on customers still wanting low prices and fast delivery in 10 years, use AI for insights and analysis but verify decisions with experienced people, give AI concise clean context to avoid what he calls context rot, train everyone not just technical staff, build a toolkit of three to five specialized tools that solve 90% of problems, write custom prompts, and combine AI with your unique process, relationships and expertise as the moat. He invites business owners trying to scale past seven figures to DM him ‘AI business’ on Instagram for his implementation playbook.

Key takeaways

• Use AI as a co-pilot to make your team 10 times better, not to replace them — business is human to human, not just B2B
• Fix a process manually first and learn what works, then use AI to automate the biggest bottlenecks; automating a broken process makes it broken faster
• Keep humans in the loop for customer touch points and use AI only for simple repetitive questions, because customer conversations are where you learn what is broken and what to build
• Give AI concise, clean context rather than as much data as possible, and learn AI fundamentals so you understand hallucinations and limitations
• Build a toolkit of three to five specialized AI tools matched to real problems, write your own prompts, and make your advantage AI plus your unique process, relationships and expertise

Episode details: published February 16, 2026 · 11:21 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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