Last week, I attended WordCamp Asia and noticed that a lot of the conversations I had circled back to the same thing: AI. Some people were excited. Some were curious. Some scared. Many didn’t know where to start. On the drive back home, one thought wouldn’t leave me alone..
AI is leverage.
Not a tool to learn. Not a threat to outrun. Leverage. The kind that shows up once in a generation.
This has happened before. In the early 2000s, the internet was sitting right there. Most people saw it as a curiosity. Some saw it as a threat. Blockbuster laughed at Netflix. Newspapers ignored Craigslist. Kodak invented digital photography and shelved it. But a few saw the internet for what it was: a lever that could multiply what one person could do.
Matt Mullenweg built WordPress and changed how the world publishes. Amit Agarwal started a tech blog from Agra and became one of India’s first professional bloggers. Just one person and a lever. I grew up watching that wave reshape so many things around me.
AI is that lever now.
And I don’t say this just because of conversations I had at WordCamp Asia. I lead an AI implementation team at Automattic. The work means I’m constantly exploring what’s possible with AI, talking to technologists, builders, engineers, support folks, and business heads. The pattern is the same everywhere… the majority of people see AI as something they need to learn to keep up. A skill to add to the resume. A way to do the same job, but faster.
That’s thinking too small.
The real shift isn’t doing your current work more efficiently. It’s doing work that wasn’t possible before.
Here’s what I mean. At WooCommerce, our Happiness team (support engineers, not developers) recently ran something called Bug Blitz. I50 bugs got fixed in two weeks. Support team members wrote code, shipped fixes, closed bugs that had been sitting in the backlog for months.
Let that sink in.
Two years ago, that sentence wouldn’t make sense. Today, it’s a fact. (Read the full Bug Blitz story here.)
That’s what leverage looks like. Not “I used AI to write an email faster.” But “I built something I couldn’t build before.”
If you’re a builder at heart, if you’ve ever had an idea for a project but thought “I can’t code that” or “I don’t have the team for that,” that wall is gone.
This isn’t about replacing anyone. It’s about what becomes possible when the building blocks stop being the bottleneck.
You don’t need to be an engineer. You don’t need a team. You don’t need permission. You just need to start seeing AI for what it is: the biggest lever a builder has ever been handed. The question isn’t whether AI will change things. It’s whether you’ll use it while the window is open.
If someone you know is still on the fence about AI, send them the Bug Blitz story. Sometimes one example changes the whole frame.
Ash Anant 
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