I paid other freelancers more than $12k over the last few years to send me back ChatGPT's output.

For a long time I subcontracted parts of my pitch deck projects: research, financial modelling, content and design. To be quite honest with you, the designers were good, most of them. They didn't overthink it, they made sure what you wrote looked right on the slide.

The writers and researchers were a different story. Whatever ChatGPT gave them, they pasted. No sources checked, nothing adjusted, all the classic AI slop we love. So I paid them, and then I fixed whatever they sent me. Great business model. For them.

Why was I paying someone to use AI badly when I could learn to use it well? I had to ask that.

This is roughly how it evolved, in case you're somewhere on the same road:

1. AI models couldn't hold a whole deck, so I worked on the content one slide at a time. 20 to 30 hours per deck, easily. 2. Then I wrote down my full workflow and saved every prompt I used for research, financials and content, so I could repeat the process (it came to about 50 steps). 3. After that, I created skills, each one focused on an interaction with my customers: assessments, financial projections, research, content, even design. 4. Now, one agent centralizes everything. I hand it the brief and the feedback, it sends the work to the specialized agents and checks what comes back. I do the final quality control.

Today a deck takes me 1 or 2 hours. October is the first month I haven't hired anyone. The new team costs $20 each (Claude and Codex).

To get there, I had to write down everything my 400 projects and those 6000 hours taught me, so the agents had something better than the internet to learn from. That took a hell of a lot of time, but it made the output much better.

I know a lot of you subcontract too. And I know a lot of you are worried about AI, some of you are already using it, and some of you are against it. Either way, you can't sit this one out. Start building your workflows, tools and systems. Start now.

Which part of your work would you hand over first? If you want a hand with it, my inbox is open.