Do Hard Things A Podcast With Gabe Lullo Ft. Gabe Naviasky

“AI is just an extension of software. It essentially makes what we have been doing much better.” - Gabe Naviasky In this episode, Gabe shares a story about a company that chose not to work with his team simply because they were using AI. At first glance, it sounds cautious and even reasonable. This company had experienced a security breach the year before, so their hesitation around vendors like OpenAI made sense. But here’s the part that’s harder to reconcile: Avoiding a specific vendor is one thing. Avoiding AI altogether? That’s a different story. Because opting out of AI today doesn’t just mean skipping a tool, it means stepping away from the infrastructure of modern software itself. It means: • No Google search • No Siri or voice assistants • No smart automation quietly improving workflows in the background AI isn’t a feature anymore, it’s becoming the baseline. As workflows become more automated, the nature of work itself is changing. The repetitive, manual, and process-heavy tasks? Those are increasingly handled by systems. What’s left, and what becomes more valuable, is the work that requires judgment, creativity, and real-world experience. The human layer doesn’t disappear, it sharpens. So the question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s how intentionally we choose to use it and where we decide human expertise matters most.