Last updated on June 18th, 2026 at 10:25 am
If you’ve spent any time online lately, you’ve probably noticed that everyone has an opinion about AI. The takes are everywhere, and most of them are either doom and gloom or a little too cheerful about it.
But Peter Swain’s take is different. He’s been building on the internet since 1995, and AI is the third major tech wave he’s watched arrive and reshape how people work and build businesses. He’s seen this pattern before, twice, and both times he moved early and got it right.
He’s been watching technology reshape business his whole life, and his take on AI is nothing like what you’ve been hearing.
He’s Done This Twice Already
In 1995, a 17-year-old Peter went to a trade show with his dad and watched a presentation from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, about something called the internet. Most people in that room needed years to understand what they’d just heard, but Peter needed one afternoon. He dropped out of high school, turned down his university acceptance, and became one of the first web developers in the world.
Over the next decade, he built a web design and development agency and took on over 1,400 projects, including an early version of Yelp in the UK, the first automated grocery checkout for a major supermarket chain, and the first video banking kiosk.
Then in 2008, he came back from a venture in India, bought an iPhone in an airport duty free shop, and played with it on the plane home. He walked into his office the next day and told his team they were done building websites. From that point on, they were an app development agency. Any client whose project was already halfway through would get finished. Anyone who hadn’t started yet would get their money back.
That’s just how Peter operates. He doesn’t wait for a wave to be obvious before he moves. He watches what a technology does to people, figures out what that means for business, and bets everything on what he sees.
Which is exactly what he did in November 2023.
Why AI Is Different This Time
Every major tech wave Peter has lived through made people more capable. The internet meant you could reach anyone in the world, and the iPhone meant you could do it from anywhere. Each wave was essentially a better tool, and better tools have always created more opportunity for the people willing to use them.
But AI is a different story.
When ChatGPT launched its beta in November 2023, Peter downloaded it the day after it dropped. He spent a day with it and recognized immediately that this wasn’t a better tool. It was something closer to a replacement. OpenAI’s own stated mission at the time was to remove the tax of human labor from the economy. Not to make human labor faster or cheaper. To remove the need for it.
To understand why that’s a different category of change, Peter uses a simple thought experiment. Imagine your partner’s birthday is coming up and you ask an AI to suggest a gift. You go buy it yourself. Who bought the gift? You did. Now imagine the AI has your credit card and buys it for you. Still feels like you, right? Now imagine you’ve given the AI a $150 budget and told it to just handle it every year without checking in. Who bought the gift then?
That’s the question Peter wants entrepreneurs sitting with. Not because it’s scary, but because it’s honest. AI isn’t coming for the repetitive tasks anymore. It’s coming for the decisions, the relationships, and the things people have always considered distinctly human.
Peter is one of the few people in the AI space who will tell you he’d undo it if he could. Not because he thinks it’s all bad, but because he doesn’t think the world is ready for the speed of what’s coming. And yet he’s also one of the most all-in people you’ll find on using it, because the wave is here whether anyone’s ready or not.
The Five Levels of AI Adoption
One of the most useful things Peter teaches is a framework for understanding where you are with AI right now, because most people are further behind than they think, and they don’t know it.
He breaks it into five levels.
Level one is using AI the way most people use it: as a smarter version of Google. You ask it a question, it gives you an answer, you copy and paste the result. Maybe you use it to write an email or brainstorm an idea. It’s useful, but you’re still doing most of the work yourself.
Level two is where you start tying AI to a specific business goal. Instead of asking general questions, you’re asking things like: my customer churn rate is 7% and I want to get it to 5%, what should I change? The tool is the same, but the intention behind how you use it is different.
Level three is where you start connecting AI to your actual business data. You link it to your ad account, your analytics, your email platform. Instead of bringing information to AI manually, it has direct access and can work with what’s already there.
Level four is automation. You set up workflows where AI handles a sequence of tasks from start to finish, like taking a blog post and turning it into social media content, scheduling it, and posting it across multiple platforms. The difference between level three and level four is that at level four, one instruction triggers a whole chain of events.
Level five is where it gets interesting. At level five, AI isn’t waiting for you to tell it what to do. It initiates, executes, and adjusts on its own, and you only get pulled in when a human decision is needed.
Peter runs a funnel at level five that fixes and improves itself automatically. Every morning it reviews the previous day’s ad performance, cuts the ads that underperformed, creates new variations of the ones that worked, and puts them back into rotation. It also pulls Google Analytics data, identifies where people are dropping off in the funnel, runs an on-page experiment to test a fix, and checks back the next day to see what worked. The whole cycle runs every four hours. When Peter used to pay a team to do this manually, it cost close to a million dollars a year in salaries. Now it costs him about $12 a day in token fees.
He also publishes all of his weekly content from his phone. On a recent flight, he opened a messaging app, told his AI assistant to write that week’s content, and went back to watching a film. By the time he landed, three slide decks, two tools, eight prompts, LinkedIn articles, social media hooks, and a content brief for his team had all been produced, cross-referenced with his existing curriculum, and posted.
Most people who hear that are still at level one, but that’s exactly what Peter is trying to change.
What Survives When the Middle Gets Wiped Out
Every major disruption Peter has watched play out follows the same pattern. The biggest players survive because they’ve taken every possible cost out of the equation. The smallest, most specialized players survive because they’ve built something nobody else can replicate. And everything in the middle gets wiped out.
You can already see it happening. Bed Bath and Beyond is gone. Toys R Us is gone. Dozens of mid-size agencies and service businesses that were doing fine a few years ago are struggling now. They can’t compete on price with the operators running lean on AI, and they can’t compete on quality or personal touch with the businesses that have gone deep on the human side.
Peter thinks the same thing is about to happen across coaching, consulting, and online business. The question isn’t whether AI will affect your business. It’s which end of that spectrum you’re going to land on.
His answer is to go human, and then use AI to make that possible at a scale you couldn’t pull off on your own.
His community has around 10,000 members. He can’t personally notice when someone’s kid graduates or when a member has a hard week, but he has an AI agent that watches his members’ social media and flags those moments automatically. When something comes up, a handwritten note gets sent, written in his voice, via a robotic pen API. The member gets something that feels personal because the intention behind it is personal. Peter just had help executing it.
That’s the model he keeps coming back to: use AI to handle everything that can be automated, so the human energy you do have goes further. Your account managers get better, your onboarding gets more personal, and the parts of your business that actually require a person become the parts you invest in most.
The businesses that will struggle are the ones trying to sit in the middle, doing things manually but not well enough to charge premium prices, and using some AI but not enough to compete on efficiency. That middle ground is the hardest place to survive.
How Peter Thinks About His Team
Peter has a phrase he banned from his company: under promise and over deliver.
Most people treat that as gospel. The idea is that if you set expectations low and then exceed them, people will be pleasantly surprised and come back for more. But Peter thinks that’s a trap.
His argument is simple. If you tell someone you’ll deliver X and you deliver X plus twenty percent, you haven’t just impressed them. You’ve set a new baseline. Next time they expect the twenty percent. And if you only deliver what you originally promised, suddenly they’re disappointed by something that was never part of the deal.
So his rule is just promise and deliver. Say exactly what you’re going to do, do it, and stop there. He applies the same thinking to his team. When AI started becoming capable enough to handle real work, Peter didn’t sugarcoat it. He brought his team into a room and told them directly that AI was coming for the parts of their jobs that were purely task-based. Not as a threat, but as information most managers weren’t giving their people.
His point was straightforward. If your job is pressing buttons in a specific sequence, your time is probably limited. But if you’re spending your time thinking about customers, anticipating problems, and figuring out what the business needs next, you have a future here.
To back that up, he started paying bonuses to team members who built AI workflows that automated parts of their own jobs. Because telling someone to embrace the thing that might replace them, without giving them any reason to care, isn’t a strategy. The incentive makes it enticing.
What he’s really after is a team that thinks more and does less, because the doing part is increasingly something AI can handle, and handle well. The humans he wants around him are the ones asking what’s next, not the ones waiting to be told.
What Peter’s Story Teaches About Surviving AI
Peter has made the same bet three times, and it’s worked every time. He credits it to two questions he asks every time a new technology shows up: what does this do to people? And what does that mean for my business?
According to Peter, the move is simple. Direct AI, don’t compete with it. Use it to handle everything that can be automated, and protect and invest in everything that can’t.
For most entrepreneurs building coaching, consulting, or online businesses right now, AI is an opening for smaller operators. The playing field is shifting in a way that favors people who move fast and stay lean. You don’t need a massive team to run a serious business anymore. You need clarity on what you’re building, the right tools to build it, and a funnel that converts the people you’re already reaching.
That last part is where ClickFunnels comes in. Whether you’re just getting started or you’re already running a business and want to tighten up how it sells, a well built funnel is still what turns traffic into revenue. Peter uses ClickFunnels. A lot of the entrepreneurs he teaches do too.
You can try ClickFunnels free for 14 days and see what it does for your business before spending a dollar on it.
And if you want to go deeper on what Peter teaches, you can find him at peterswain.com.