I spent five days in California last week. Two of them in San Francisco.

First time back in over six years, which means my first time since AI took over everything. And it definitely shows. Driverless cars pulling up to the curb like that's normal. AI ads on billboards over the freeway, at the bus stop, on the side of the tram.

One of them asked if my APIs were ready for AI agents. I don't have APIs. But I do have two toddlers and a newsletter.

Another one, from ServiceNow, I actually loved: without workflows, AI is just expensive advice trained on Reddit.

Most of those companies I knew from my tech years. Most of those tools are built for developers, not for me, which is why half the ads made no sense.

But standing at a bus stop not understanding an ad, I got it. No wonder everyone here is building something. You can't get away from it. You're just immersed in it.

So I flew home and thought: how do I soak in AI from Montreal? And how do I help you do it too?

I made a list. Listing is what I do best.

Immersing yourself in AI to learn AI is not a strange idea at all. It's the same reason people move to Montreal to learn French, or save up for a few months in Paris. Language immersion works because a textbook can hand you vocabulary and rules, but you only get better by living in it. You're terrible at first. You mix up words, you say the wrong thing at the bakery, and then one morning you catch yourself understanding a conversation in French.

San Francisco is an AI immersion program. It's just imposed on you, one billboard at a time.

When I got curious and looked into those ads, I found out a good billboard spot can run into the millions of dollars a year, and almost none of them are written for someone like me. They still worked. Two days in, I was thinking about AI constantly, which is exactly what immersion does to you.

Back home in Montreal, my immersion has to be scheduled. Last I checked, nobody is putting an AI billboard outside my kitchen.

So how do you launch your own immersion program while juggling everything else? You don't. You start with the raw material, then you have AI build the plan around it.

The raw material first. I put together the Cinz.AI Resource Hub: every training, article, newsletter and creator I actually used to teach myself this stuff. Not a roundup of what's popular. The real list.

It's version one, which means it's short rather than complete. Tell me what's missing and it goes in. The next version gets built from your replies.

Now the plan. Open the Shelf, pick one or two things that make you curious, and hand AI the rest.

Tell it what you already know, how much time you actually have, when in the day you're most likely to show up, and what you want to get better at. A plan built around something you want is a plan you'll keep.

Here's mine, so you can see what real inputs look like. Five to six hours a week, Monday to Friday, mostly at lunch or on a walk with my headphones in. Right now I want to build a small team of agents to help me run Cinz.AI. Yours might be building your first skill, setting up a project, or running Claude, ChatGPT and Copilot against the same task to see which one you actually like.

Copy this, fill in your own answers, and paste it into whatever tool you're using:

Then open your calendar and book week one. Do it before you close this tab, because a plan without a time on it is just a nice idea.

🧠 Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody was taught how. Study.com surveyed a thousand employees this spring and found that nine in ten people use AI at work, but only about one in six of those feels ready to use it well. A third have had no training at all, and among everyone else, nearly half taught themselves. The number one barrier people named was time, and most of them said two hours a week or less would be enough to actually get better. → Read it here

📇 The billboard that said "AI Dread?" and nothing else. Remember the billboards I couldn't decode? One of them showed up in San Francisco and New York with no logo, no company name, no website. Just those two words and a phone number you could call to hear a recorded message. People called the number. Turns out the mystery advertiser was Notion, the same tool a lot of us use for our notes and planning. So even the ad about being overwhelmed by AI was made by an AI company. I don't know how I feel about that, but I have not stopped thinking about it.→ Read it here

First, the shelf. It's version one, built from what I actually use, and I'll keep adding to it. Bookmark it, and if something you love is missing, tell me, and it goes in. The Cinz.AI Resource Hub

Second, my question. San Francisco has AI on every billboard, and the people living there didn't choose it. You get to choose yours, which is either better or harder depending on the day.

So here it is: what day and time did you book?

Hit reply and tell me. One line is enough. I'll be reading every single one, and the best answers are going in the next issue.

Cinz ✌🏼

Cinz.AI

Your unfair advantage, one week at a time.

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