Opinion: You don’t need to be a tech pioneer to benefit from AI

Matthew Stublefield

Recently, artificial intelligence startup founder Matt Shumer posted a thread on X that racked up over 80 million views. He compared what’s happening with AI to the early days of the COVID pandemic – the moment before everything changed. He warned that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear within five years and urged people to get their finances in order. People I know locally started sharing it – with reactions split between “finally someone said it” and “this is ridiculous.”

Much of what he wrote struck a chord with me. As a product management consultant who works with development teams, I’ve watched AI reshape how we build software over the past three years. The changes are real. But the version of this story that Springfield businesses need to hear isn’t the scary one; it’s the practical one.

Last November, Codefi hosted Missouri’s first “vibeathon” – a hackathon where participants use AI to build working software by describing what they want in plain English. No coding required. The winner was Tenise Wertman, a mother of nine from Verona, with no programming background. Over a single weekend, she built an AI-powered scheduling tool for health care providers that reduces no-shows and improves staff efficiency. She took first place – a solo competitor with no technical background.

I spoke with Kevin Kirchner at Codefi about that event and the upcoming Springfield vibeathon during Springfield Tech Week later this month. What struck me about Tenise’s story is what it reveals about how AI actually works best. She wasn’t a technologist. She was someone who deeply understood a problem – the chaos of health care scheduling – and could communicate that clearly to an AI tool. The AI handled the technical execution; she provided judgment and direction.

That’s the key insight for any business owner: AI works best when you bring the thinking. You don’t need technical skills. You need to know your problem well enough to describe it clearly – the bottleneck in your process, the question you keep answering manually or the task that eats your Tuesday afternoons. AI handles the execution. You provide the judgment. The people getting the worst results are the ones who skip that step, handing everything over without understanding what they actually need. The people getting the best results look a lot like Tenise – deeply familiar with their problem and thoughtful about the solution.

Of course, the fear behind posts like Shumer’s isn’t really about software. It’s that AI will replace workers wholesale – that we’ll need fewer people, period. That reminds me of the Jevons paradox from the Industrial Revolution. When steam engines grew more efficient, many assumed coal consumption would drop. Instead, it surged because efficiency created new applications nobody had imagined. I think the fear that AI means fewer people doing less work misses the bigger picture. We’re going to find more things worth doing.

What grounds me is simpler: Humans haven’t changed. Our customers are still people who value genuine relationships and trust. AI is a powerful tool for freeing up time to focus on the work that matters most: understanding customers, solving real problems and building real connections. But it doesn’t replace any of that. The businesses that get this right will be the ones that use AI wisely, not just aggressively.

If you’re curious where to start, Springfield Tech Week kicking off March 23 offers several good entry points. The vibeathon is free, open to complete beginners, and starts with hands-on training – if you can describe a problem, you can participate.

You don’t need to be a tech pioneer to benefit from AI. You already know your business and your customers better than any algorithm. That’s the hard part. The rest is just getting started.

Matthew Stublefield is the founder and principal consultant at Fieldway LLC and is a member of the Springfield Tech Council advocacy committee. He can be reached at matthew@fieldway.org.