Did you just think to yourself that “Oh shit, AI took my job”? Yeah, it happens. It’s in the air. It’s the zeitgeist. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is taking our jobs! Or not. It depends on how you look at it. It also depends a lot on how you take it. 😉
If this happened to you, devilish AI actually took your job, perhaps the options you’re considering are these:
- Get devastated, go broke, and live on unemployment benefits. Just give up. 🙁
- Take it as a minor setback, skill up, and get a fresh start on a new slowly developing career. 😐
- Go solo and start your dream life as a freelancer! 😀
Let’s say you’re not a quitter, so Option 1 isn’t really an option. Let’s also say, that you know your industry well enough to know where that “devilish AI” might get you even if you learned some new skills and got a new job. It might turn out to be a temporary solution.
Let’s then say that you see your obsolete job as being an opportunity in this situation, and you plan to seize it. Seriously. You decide to turn your life around, build your own business from scratch, and show the middle finger to that devilish AI while laughing like a maniac: “Muahahahahaa!”
In this case, you take AI as a blessing in disguise. It forced you to leave your day job and try something new and challenging. And let me tell you, it is challenging to build a business from scratch just like that, no matter your background. I speak from experience which is now a decade behind me. My first 6 months were… well, let’s just say they were quite unproductive compared to my freelancing months 7-12.
If AI took your job, don’t worry. You’re not the only one!
I wrote this little article to examine the option of turning freelancer because of being replaced by AI. I thought there are five things that you could use to turn the situation around and instead of getting all miserable, you might find the opportunity of your lifetime by starting your own business as a freelancer.
Let’s go through all these “tricks” quickly so that you have a clear pathway toward your new career.
1. Become AI-literate
Probably the most intuitive step is to be done first: If AI beats you first, you need to beat AI and hit back! Fight! Learn what it is. And no, you don’t need to get a Ph.D. first to do that. No. Your first objective is to develop enough understanding about AI to be able to use it.
You don’t need to learn all the machine learning methods ever developed, the plethora of generative AI algorithms, and all technical things. You just learn enough about what the latest AI tools and services do for you and what limitations they currently have. That’s it!
Paying for courses is probably the best way, especially if you get a widely known certificate. Check out Coursera, Udemy, and perhaps even LinkedIn Learning. Focus on what you learn about AI and try to categorize all the tools and services by their usefulness in your field. Yes, your old job! Do they actually do all of it? I bet not really if you think about it. They may do most of it, but not all.
Once you’ve gotten the theory part right, go hands-on. Try the most relevant tools you’ve found. Try all of them! Most tools offer free trials, and the ones that don’t, they are probably worth spending a few bucks just to know if they could be the key to your success as an AI-powered freelancer.
Lastly, keep this step as a repetitive action to stay up to date. AI progresses so fast these days that you’d better sign up for newsletters and updates on all the tools you’ve come to know. And perhaps start following general AI news such as AI Weekly and popular podcasts just to be safe.
2. Find transferable skills
What was it that made you good in your previous job? What of those factors can you keep as your core skill in your freelance career? There’s always something. Most often, if indeed AI replaced you, it was only your hard skills that took the hit. Soft skills, on the other hand, are something AI still has no clue about!
Are you good at communication and collaboration? Do you work well with other people? If you answered ‘yes’ and ‘yes’, you’re one step ahead of your peers when turning freelance! Many today still find it difficult to break the ice with strangers and get a conversation going. You might find that networking is a great way forward in your case… and that it is, in fact, one of the cornerstones of building a freelance business.
Another obvious part is your industry knowledge in general. How do things work, who are the big players, and what positioning could an individual take to get a foothold as a new business? You might have all the answers in your head already.
The third obvious part is your ability to solve problems in general. While AI services like ChatGPT can do quite impressive things in terms of piecing together text in a seemingly logical way, it still lacks the common sense that a small kid would have. Genuine reasoning ability and knowledge of how the world works still beats AI anytime especially if you ask for tips for making your pizza better. Yeah, you might be recommended to add some glue to your pizza. 😛
All this intuitiveness we as people have is something AI will struggle with for years to come. Being a nice guy working well together with clients is nearly irreplaceable from the customer experience point of view. You could be the star in your clients’ eyes!
3. Pick a sweet niche
Third, it’s time to do some analysis. You know your strengths and weaknesses, you know what skills you can bring to the table, and you have an idea of who your clients might be. Now, refine it.
If you’re a natural salesman, you have a good network of people who might become your clients, and you like face-to-face meetings, offline freelancing might be a good way to go. But if you realize (like me a decade ago) that it’s too slow to find clients in your physical space, go online. Join some of the freelance sites, and apply all my knowledge to finding a perfect niche for yourself.
Here’s a thought exercise from one of my most well-received articles titled Freelancing – It’s an Expert’s Game that helps you narrow down what you do for whom and who your competitors might be:
- Write down the problem that some people have and the solution you offer in a very efficient way.
- Imagine all other people in the world who can deliver a less efficient solution to the problem.
- Imagine those people who can offer an equally efficient solution to the problem.
- Imagine a dream client who needs the solution more than most. Typically, these are people whose business you can enable and not people who would only gain a slightly more convenient way to execute it.
- Research where those dream clients go to find the solutions they need.
For experienced professionals, this thought experiment isn’t too hard. Just go through it. When you know what you’re good at, it’s all about defining your clientele as closely as you can. Marketers call it Ideal Client Profile (ICP).
And there’s one little caveat for you. It isn’t hard to identify people who you could make super-happy with your work. It’s always a little harder to come up with a category of people who would be willing to pay you handsomely at the same time!
And here is where you could look into senior freelancers in your field… not as your competitors, but as inspiration-
Whereas senior freelancers you might consider as your competitors are seemingly ahead of you, your chance to build a business could depend on your newly found AI skills. You might realize you have an advantage over those who have been good at freelancing in your niche for a decade but refuse to update their skills and learn AI as you did.
You might, just might, go straight for coconuts as I did.
4. Focus on your online presence
Unless you decide to turn to offline freelancing at first, at some point, you’re going to need a strong online presence. You must make yourself visible to your ideal clients! The more such people you manage to reach, the wider market you can claim eventually.
Make a portfolio homepage with testimonials. Sign up to LinkedIn to grow an audience that is full of people who fit your ICP. Brand yourself like CocoLord if you’d like! Make it super formal or go funny, exquisite, slightly excentric, but ahh so intriguing but putting some effort into your online outlook (e.g. using caricature LinkedIn banners).
Create a workflow description that highlights your fluency in utilizing AI. Put all the cool keywords that you’ve picked up, and describe your services and work process in a simple way that non-AI experts get. Do it on multiple sites to maximize your reach and stay consistent with the message across all of them… and there you go, you’ve got a decent online presence.
5. Make use of AI in your work process
Now it’s execution time! The tools you picked up in the first phase come in handy in getting your first gigs done and finished. Automation tools, content creation & management tools, and project management tools… all become part of your daily work process to the extent that you might realize little gaps in between them.
You could, then, start thinking of creating better tools of your own by partnering with a techie or two and level up as a solopreneur who is not only doing projects for money but also building multiple income streams by building products for others like you.
Here, the only danger is that you get a little lost with all the automation and AI stuff, and forget the core of doing business with people. As your main goal in the execution phase is to create a vast clientele who you can rely on for regular work, retainers, and totally (coco)nuttily great gigs, you must not forget that you are the core part of your business. You are the only differentiator between your clients picking your services vs. someone else’s services.
Stay true to yourself and don’t get lost in the forest of AI tools. You might have some tough times delivering all the work flawlessly every time, but you learn from mistakes and improve, I’m sure.
One simple thing anyone can do is ask for feedback. Yeah, ask your clients perhaps when you’re close to ending a project if there’s anything more you could have done. It gives a nice humble outlook on your services and your person, and people a more than happy to “help” you by giving feedback.
You might not always like what you hear, but you’ll definitely learn about how your clients experience the time they spend working with you. It’s worth asking. It also helps build professional relationships with your clients with the aim of creating a rather long-lasting client base for yourself.
Another simple thing you could do with all your clients is share your knowledge about all the AI tools you’ve come to master. Do it for free as a little bonus! They’ll love you for that, perhaps. And unlike what you might think, most would still want you to take care of things since you have their full trust.
On top of that, you could offer paid training, consultation, workshops, and presentations on how to make AI work for your business by drawing examples from your own business. There’s no better example!
“AI took my job, but I made AI work for me!”
So, here you go. 5 relatively simple phases, although going through them is a lot of hard work, might be enough to save yourself from the misery of unemployment or short-term re-employment in a suboptimal day job.
You might now have a pathway open to creating an AI-powered one-person business. You make the rules, you pick your clients, you execute all the hard parts of the work, and leave the mundane tasks to AI to handle as much as you can.
With these words, I wish you luck with your new business. And remember, if it all gets overwhelming, CoachLancer Member plans are always open to extraordinary individuals.
