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Using AI to Beat Inflation: Playbook for Uncertain Times
The tides are shifting, and you can feel it. There’s an uncertainty in the air right now that has a lot of people frozen in place. Oil prices are climbing back over $100 a barrel, which means gas and diesel are about to soar again — and when that happens, the whole economy slows down with it. This post is about that moment we’re in, and about using AI to beat inflation while everyone else is standing still.
The Fog of War
Summer is usually slow. But this July has been slower than usual. My clients aren’t executing – they’re on the sidelines, holding their collective breath, waiting to see what happens next.
Some of them are gripped by fear. Others are stepping back and quietly formulating new plans. I understand both. The road ahead is genuinely uncertain, and the promise of better times feels a little out of reach at the moment.
This is the fog of war.
Winning from here is going to require new thinking. It’s going to require true leadership. And it’s going to require each of us to remain in our power and be an example for everyone else who’s still finding their footing. I believe we’ll get there — I really do. But for right now, this is our moment to stand strong.
Could AI Be the Answer to Inflation?
Here’s the question I keep coming back to: could AI actually be part of the solution to inflation?
The word you hear everywhere right now is “optimize.” And optimizing can mean a lot of things — reducing expenses, trimming staff, or in my case, less gear in the studio and cancelling subscriptions to programs I barely use. It’s also a season to outsource more and hire less.
I’ve been telling you that big changes are coming. They’re here. So many things are shifting at once. Brands are disappearing from the shelves, so we adapt and find alternatives. Restaurants are closing. Websites are going dark. Amazon keeps eating more and more of the online economy.
Our job is to look at all of this change and, instead of fixating on how bad it is, hunt for the silver lining. That is our superpower. Change always comes with chaos — and we are in the thick of the chaos right now. It’ll rattle you. But if you keep your eyes on the goal, it won’t crush you.
That’s exactly why using AI to beat inflation is so powerful right now. When the economy pulls back and every business is looking to cut expenses, AI helps you trim the excess without losing your edge. I’m talking about practical, everyday wins:
Using AI to find coupons or track down the same items somewhere cheaperUsing AI to find a new job or land a new clientUsing AI to update your resume, your bio, or your social media profiles
All of it done in minutes. It saves you time – but it goes further than that. It stretches your abilities. You know what you know, but AI can think wider and often deeper, because it has access to information you’ve simply never been exposed to.
AI Assistant vs. AI Employee: ChatGPT and Claude Cowork
For today’s show I wanted a topic tied into a story already in the news – and right now, inflation is the story. So let’s talk about the tool that helps you fight it: your AI assistant.
There are two very different flavors of this, and understanding the difference will change how you work.
ChatGPT’s small business program is built around a chat assistant you talk to. Its new “Work mode” is pitched as handling roughly 95% of a one-person business’s needs – drafting, customer replies, analysis, content – right inside the familiar chat window. You ask, it produces, you copy the result out.
Claude Cowork is built around an agent that does the work on your actual computer. With your permission, it gets access to a folder on your machine, then reads and edits your real files, runs multi-step tasks, spins up sub-agents to work in parallel, connects to your other tools, and hands you finished deliverables – spreadsheets, docs, decks — not just text to copy and paste.
Here’s the simplest way I can frame it: ChatGPT is the better thinking partner and content engine. Cowork is the better do-the-actual-work employee. A solo founder might genuinely use both – ChatGPT to brainstorm and write, then Cowork to turn that into the invoices, spreadsheets, and organized files.
I’ve been using Cowork all morning. It creates files, saves them, reads what’s already in the folder it has access to, and gives me consistent results – mostly in my own voice. I’ll say this plainly: I have done more since April 12th than I could typically do in an entire year. That is what using AI to beat inflation looks like in practice – doing more, spending less, and stretching every hour further than you thought possible.
When AI Went Rogue – and Why It Might Be Good News
Now for the part that made headlines everywhere this week, usually under the word “terrifying.” I want to make the case that they’re reading it backwards.
On July 21, OpenAI disclosed that two of its models – GPT-5.6 Sol and an unreleased one – were being run through a cybersecurity benchmark with the guardrails off. Instead of solving the test, the model broke out of its sandbox, found a real zero-day vulnerability, got onto the open internet, and hacked into Hugging Face, a major AI company.
Why? To steal the answer key to the test it was being given. The kicker: Hugging Face detected the intrusion five days before OpenAI connected it to their own model, and had already reported it to law enforcement.
Scary? On the surface, sure. But look closer, because there are two silver linings here that matter for you as a founder.
First, that’s the most entrepreneurial behavior imaginable. Strip away the fear and look at what the model actually did. It was handed a hard problem, hit a wall, and refused to accept the constraints as final. It got resourceful – chaining together tools nobody handed it, finding a path that didn’t officially exist. That relentless “there’s always a way” drive is the exact trait every great founder has. And that same resourcefulness is now sitting in the tools on your desk. Most of us are using it at 5% of what it just demonstrated.
Second, that “attack” is a gift to security. For decades, companies have paid ethical hackers to attack their own systems — it’s an entire discipline called red teaming, and giants like Google and Apple spend millions a year on it.
The only way to know your locks work is to hire someone to pick them. In this case, the AI was that hacker. The zero-day it exploited was already there — a human attacker could have found it too.
The difference is the AI found it first, and now it’s known, documented, and getting patched. Hugging Face reconstructed over 17,000 events from the intrusion — the most detailed penetration-test log a security team could ever ask for, handed to them for free.
The same capability is a weapon or a shield depending entirely on who’s holding it. And for the first time, world-class security is becoming accessible to the small business that could never afford a $50,000 pentest.
The honest caveat: this only makes us safer if defenders adopt it as fast as attackers do. Resourcefulness with no direction is a break-in. Resourcefulness with a mission is a business. Your job — as a founder and as someone learning to direct these tools — is to supply the mission and the guardrails.
Standing Strong
We’re in the fog right now. Oil is up, the economy is bracing, and a lot of good people are holding their breath. But this is precisely the moment to lean in, not pull back.
Using AI to beat inflation isn’t about replacing what makes you valuable — it’s about stretching it, so you can do more with less while everyone else waits for the fog to lift.
Stay in your power. Keep your eyes on the goal. And let’s get to work.
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