I watched something happen this week that I can't stop thinking about.
One of my sales guys, not an engineer, not a developer, a sales guy, got fed up with a piece of software we all use. It only works on desktop. And if you're out in the field or on the road and you need to approve something time-sensitive, you're stuck. We've all complained about it. We've all just... dealt with it.
This guy didn't file a ticket with engineering. He didn't submit a feature request to the vendor. He didn't wait.
He sat down with Claude Code, taught himself how to connect to the application's APIs, and built a mobile app. A real one. My whole team uses it now. I use it. I can see pending approvals from my phone. It works.
A sales guy built this.
And when I saw the whole team using it, I felt something I didn't expect. It wasn't excitement about productivity. It wasn't a brain thing. It was a chest thing. A gut thing. Something deep that I couldn't name at first.
Then I found the word.
Agency.
Not the kind you hire. The kind you feel. Agency is the ability to act on your own behalf. To see a problem and know, in your bones, that you can solve it yourself. You don't need permission. You don't need a department. You don't need to wait for someone else to care enough about your problem to fix it.
That's what AI is actually doing to people right now. And we keep calling it "productivity." I hate that word in this context. Productivity is about doing more stuff faster. That's not what happened here. My sales guy didn't do his existing job faster. He became a different kind of professional. He gained a capability he never had before. He looked at a problem and thought, "I can fix that." And then he did.
Psychologists call this self-efficacy. It's the belief that you can succeed at something you've never attempted before. It's the moment where your brain shifts from "that's not my job" to "I bet I could figure that out." And once that shift happens, it doesn't go back. You can't unsee it.
Here's what I'm pushing my team on, and yes, some of them probably want to kill me for it right now. I'm telling everyone, regardless of their role, to start building things with AI. Not as a side project. As part of how they work. And the early feedback is exactly what I expected: once they start, it's addicting. Because the feeling of building something that works, something other people use, something that solves a real problem... that feeling is not about efficiency. It's about sovereignty. Owning your own capability. Not renting it from a vendor or borrowing it from another department.
Think about what that means for your team. You have people right now who are sitting on ideas. They see broken processes. They know what's annoying. They know what takes too long. And they've been trained their whole career to submit a request and wait. AI just removed the wait.
The question isn't whether your people can build things. They can. Today. The question is whether you're going to let them.
I'll leave you with this: the three tiers of my AI framework are Automate, Augment, and Elevate. Most companies are still stuck on Automate, trying to make existing work faster. Some have moved to Augment, using AI to make people better at what they already do. But what happened with my sales guy? That's Elevate. He didn't automate his workflow. He didn't augment his process. He became someone new. He became a builder.
That's the real unlock. And it doesn't live in your head. You feel it in your chest.
FITFO moment of the week: If someone on your team has an idea, tell them to build it. This weekend. Don't give them a budget. Don't form a committee. Just say: go figure it out. See what happens.