Almost Timely News: 🗞️ The Five Levels of AI Enablement (2026-03-22)

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ The Five Levels of AI Enablement (2026-03-22) :: View in Browser

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What’s On My Mind: The Five Levels of AI Enablement

What’s on my mind this week? The five levels of AI enablement. This is something that has been banging around in my head for a while, and I want to try and get it out of my head and into some kind of written form.

This all started a couple of years ago with my friend Brooke Sellas, who runs B Squared Media. Their thing was always done-for-you social media marketing; they now do customer experience. If you need an agency to help you with digital customer experience, they’re a terrific agency. But Brooke’s thing was always done for you. And I was like, well, what else is there?

The other was done by you - you do the work. And so I was thinking to myself, well, if done by you and done for you exist, that seems like the equivalent of going out to eat at a restaurant or staying home and making something from scratch. So there’s got to be a middle ground. And the middle ground, of course, is done with you.

That’s where you have - in food-analogy land - things like HelloFresh and Blue Apron and those meal delivery kits. The box arrives at your door, filled with refrigerated cooler packs and things. You unpack it, everything’s already pre-cut and pre-measured. You still have to cook it, but the process of preparation is largely done.

For a while, that’s been product-market fit: done by you, done with you, done for you. Done by you, you do all the work. Done with you, you do some of the work. Done for you, you do none of the work.

Part of product-market fit - and I’ve advised this to people for years - is that you have to have offerings at every level. Done by you is the lowest cost. You read a book like my book Almost Timeless. It’s a very low investment - I think it’s still $29 - but you have to do all the work. Done with you are things like apps, add-ons, and courses where a lot more has been prepared for you. And then done for you is you hire Trust Insights to go do the thing for you.

Same with food: done by you, you cook from scratch - lowest cost, most labor. Meal kit, less labor, more cost. Done for you, no labor, highest cost.

And so I started to apply this to AI.

Part 1: Product Market Fit and AI

If we think about it, AI has kind of gone through these stages. In the beginning - 2023, right? ChatGPT came out in the fall of 2022, became popular in 2023 - when you’re sitting in front of ChatGPT prompting, that is the lowest possible level.

In the five levels of AI enablement, that’s done by you. You sit down with ChatGPT and you’re like, hey, ChatGPT, do this thing, write me this blog post. Traditional, classic. Everybody has done that in some capacity. That’s the lowest level of this product-market fit framework.

The second level up is things like GPTs, or Gems, or Projects. This came about in 2023 and 2024. GPTs and Gems are like mini apps inside of these tools that allow you to have some of the process baked in. I have a recipe maker Gem in Gemini that has all the rules about what I think is important in recipes, and it works great. I still have to do a fair amount of the work, but it has all the logic and all the prompts pre-built in it. I can just say, hey, I need a recipe for a whole wheat pancake mix, and it goes off and does that thing and hands it back to me. I still have to go make the pancakes. That’s the second level.

The third level is where we get into agentic AI and the done-for-you model - and this is where we are starting to evolve.

Here’s the full framework, absolutely, positively copyrighted to Trust Insights every way we can:

Done by you. Done with you. Done for you. Done without you. Done anticipating you. Five levels. Let me walk through each one.

Part 2: Mapping AI to Product Market Fit

Level 1: Done By You

This is pure level one. You chat with Claude or Gemini or ChatGPT, you’re doing all the work, lowest cost - $20 a month. You have access to the tools. This is what everybody knows.

Here’s the problem with this level. It saves you time and gives you some capabilities, for sure - not saying it doesn’t. But when you hear people say, “I haven’t seen the ROI of AI,” it’s because they’re stuck at this level. Everybody’s got ChatGPT and they’re like, I don’t know what to use this for.

This is all foundational. Learning how to prompt, learning how to talk to the systems, learning their ins and outs and their weaknesses, learning how to provide good data - because the more data you give, the less they hallucinate. This is level one. This is the base, this is the foundation. You have to learn this stuff first.

But you can’t stay here. This is not the zone of productivity. About 75 to 80 per