ORANGE PARK – Guests were reminded of several revolutions in the past 30 years at the quarterly Clay Economic Development Corporation's Luncheon on Thursday, Feb. 5.

There was a time when most of us didn’t have a person computer or a cellphone. Now it seems nobody can be without one.

Every business now has a website.

Sears wrote the playbook on retail, only to become obsolete by Amazon. Blockbuster ruled the home movie universe, only to be erased in less than 10 years by Netflix.

Green Cove Springs Pragmatic Works Founder and CEO Brian Knight said the next wave of technology that will revolutionize the way we think and do business is artificial intelligence (AI).

“Really, the question that comes in is AI is not just a new technology, it’s the minimum bar, like having a website, like having a phone, to being operational in our world now,” he said. “So, there we go. This is a big number.”

As the guest speaker, Knight told the sold-out audience AI will replace 92 million workers in the United States and 300 million worldwide by 2030, especially for entry-level jobs.

However, AI will require a lot of technical support, which means as many as 170 million new hires by 2030, Knight said.

“One of the cool numbers I've seen is that an AI-driven employee from Price-Waterhouse can generate three times more revenue than a non-AI-driven employee,” he said. “Even though there's 92 million jobs that might be displaced, the same conservative study is showing that 170 million jobs will be added with AI enabled, so it's a net-net of a positive gain.

“We see this with every revolution, right? When we saw .com, the retailers all packed up. It shifted. It created new jobs.”

Knight said AI is very critical in Northeast Florida since the Jacksonville area is home to four Fortune 500 companies. Knight said Jacksonville is ranked fourth in the country among cities most affected by AI displacement.

The message is clear: you can embrace AI and let it simplify your life, or you can be left in the dark ages.

“If you've done AI on a fairly regular basis, for example, one little agent in my case has claimed back almost 10% of my time just by itself, and all it does is watch my email,” Knight said. “It will unsubscribe from the (garbage) emails I get. It will move the stuff that's really important and flag it and categorize it, and also draft responses. That one has saved me about two hours a day by itself.

“I don't know about you guys, but I get about three or four hundred emails a day, and I'm spending about an hour-and-a-half to two hours just figuring out do I need to read this or not.”

The AI program sorts his emails for him. AI will also help you write emails, stories and papers – all with correct spelling and grammar. It can also help with billing, filling out purchase orders and building strategic plans.

Knight said the best use of AI is to not replace employees, but to make them more efficient.

“AI is going to amplify the employees we have today, not replace them,” he said. “We have to treat this like a growth opportunity, not like a job displacement.”

Another critical use of AI is to create a blind sales pitch that is more apt to catch a potential buyer’s eye. Most cold call emails aren’t read, much less answered.

“Initially, building the rubric is the No. 1 tool that you can get out of the day,” Knight said. “We can say, instead of just build an email, we can say build a rubric of the perfect email that's going to get Joe to click on this email.

“It's going to grade what a perfect email looks like, compose that email, and then keep on iterating it over and over until it finally gets a 10 out of 10.”

Many in the room at the Thrasher-Horne Conference Center probably were amazed when dial-up internet was introduced in the early 1990s. Now it takes less than a second to be connected to a wireless service.

Knight said it’s only going to get faster and better. We can get on board or keep logging into our old DOS accounts.