Why Hyper-Personalized AI Assistants Make You Antifragile as a Creator
How to grow from AI uncertainty and win long term
The AI wave isn’t coming.
It’s already here. And the current is getting faster.
New tools drop daily. Workflows evolve weekly. Competitors adapt in real time. And somewhere in the blur, the divide is deepening: those who know how to leverage AI and those who don’t.
A Jan 2025 survey done by Collectively of 192 creators revealed that only 20% of their respondents didn't use any AI tools. An overwhelming 80% admitted to using generative AI in some forms, most notably through the following:
As a creator, if you're not actively integrating AI into how you work, you're falling behind.
You're becoming more fragile by the day.
Fragility in the Age of AI
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined the term "antifragility," defines fragility as a system that is harmed by volatility, randomness, and disorder. In other words, fragile systems are those that break easily under stress or uncertainty.
This is exactly what many creators are facing today.
The more creators resist AI, the more fragile they become.
Right now, we’re seeing a widening gap between AI-literate creators who are rapidly iterating and scaling their ideas, and those who are stuck in old systems — burning time and energy just to stay afloat.
Fragility, in this context, means that small shocks can shake your entire creative business or system. This could include a new tool, a shift in content trends, or a shift in client or customer preferences (such as requests for AI-enhanced deliverables). In a world that rewards speed and scale, being fragile is a liability.
McKinsey’s State of AI reveals that “78 percent of respondents say their organizations use AI in at least one business function” in their latest survey. I see this happening too. My clients all integrate AI into their workflows, and government offices, even in my unknown, small town in the Philippines, routinely use generative AI in their functions.
What does this mean? As difficult as it might be to accept, freelancers and solo creators who don’t adapt risk being edged out by those who can deliver better, faster, cheaper, powered by genAI.
If your only edge is effort, you may just be one system update away from irrelevance.
Build for antifragility
The opposite of fragile isn’t resilience.
It’s antifragility.
Resilient systems survive stress. Antifragile systems grow from it.
If you want to thrive in the AI age, your goal isn’t just to endure uncertainty—it’s to benefit from it. To turn volatility into a tailwind.
You do that by becoming both more human and more augmented.
Strategy one: Learn AI and build your assistant
It starts with understanding the tools. You don’t need to be a prompt engineer or machine learning expert. But you do need to know how to:
Generate and iterate content.
Organize and repurpose knowledge.
Use AI for research, outlining, and idea development.
Next level? Train a personalized AI assistant. One that knows your voice, your audience, your frameworks. One that challenges and ultimately improves how you think. A personal assistant will:
Help you brainstorm aligned content ideas.
Break down abstract thinking into executable steps.
Act as a sounding board, researcher, and strategic partner.
When your assistant becomes an extension of your thinking, you unlock scale without sacrificing soul.
Strategy two: Double down on being human
Antifragility doesn’t mean becoming a machine. It means creating contrast.
AI lets you automate the low-level tasks that eat up your bandwidth—outlining, summarizing, rewriting, even early-stage ideation. This frees you up to focus on high-leverage work: shaping narratives, honing unique ideas, and making strategic creative decisions.
More importantly, using AI as a tool allows you to clarify and execute on your unique mission. The thing that only you can do.
It helps you think out loud, test your assumptions, and build your vision more quickly. Your AI assistant becomes a productivity engine for your purpose.
And because it saves you time, you can reinvest that energy into cultivating relationships, engaging with your audience, and leaning into the unpromptable parts of your creativity—your story, your lived experience, your human instincts.
Spend more time on:
Honing your original thinking.
Deepening your relationships.
Telling stories only you could tell.
Exploring the edge of your lived experience.
Developing a valuable and positive reputation.
This is the barbell approach: pair machine precision with human soul.
Scale with soul
When you combine a personalized AI assistant with a deeper embodiment of your humanity, something powerful happens.
You move faster. Think bigger. Create with more consistency.
But you also become more you.
Your ideas reach further. Your voice sharpens. Your systems get smarter.
And you stop fearing the next AI leap, because you’ve built something antifragile.
Not just immune to change.
But evolved through it.
P.S. If you want to learn how to integrate AI into your creative process while keeping your voice deeply authentic, check out my book, Authentic AI.
It's a practical guide to training your own assistant, building your writing systems, and using AI without losing your soul. I launched it last Monday, July 7, and is currently 50% off until Jul 8.
Really insightful read! love how you framed the potential of hyper-personalized AI assistants. If you’re curious to see a real-world example, take a look at what we’re building dearflow.ai
Interesting take James - you've managed to explain this in a compelling way! I like what you're saying about doubling down on the "human" side, building out relationships and shifting from the focus from the manual to the strategic.