Expertise is your edge as a solopreneur in the AI era — Aneesh Raman on Open to Work

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As AI adoption matures, I’ve seen the promise and the pitfalls in my own solo practice. I’m able to spend more time on high-value work as some projects are now quicker to complete with the help of AI. And at the same time, some projects have disappeared as a result of AI.

It is a challenge at times to know where I stand on the AI spectrum. Today, I’m a skeptic who doesn’t want to be left behind. What motivates me to embrace AI is finding ways to make my business run more smoothly and guide my clients on hype-free, practical applications.

One of my greatest assets in this process has been my expertise, and it’s yours too. People hire us as outside experts for the years of experience and knowledge we’ve accumulated in a given field. We’re more equipped to identify an issue, present options for paths forward, and solve the problem.

This confidence, judgment, and the power of your opinion can’t be replicated. AI can share best practices, but doesn’t have the perspective or wisdom you have, that’s irreplaceable. We all need to tap into our expertise and net-new thinking as we continue to embrace the changing dynamics of work and how we show up as a business of one in this market.

In this week’s edition, Aneesh Raman, the Chief Economic Opportunity Officer at LinkedIn, shares practical ways solopreneurs can adopt AI by leveraging their expertise. If you want to go deeper, pick up a copy of his book: Open to Work: How to Get Ahead in the Age of AI.

You used to need capital, a team, and six months just to test an idea. Now you can research a market, build a prototype, and launch a landing page in a weekend.

The cost of starting just collapsed. But beyond just cost, AI gives solopreneurs something that used to be reserved for big companies with big budgets: on-demand expertise across every function. Marketing strategy, legal research, financial modeling, customer insights.

You don’t need a team of specialists anymore to get a business idea off the ground. You need curiosity and the right questions. That’s a big unlock for businesses of one.

We’re already seeing it in the data — a 69% year-over-year uptick in people adding “Founder” to their LinkedIn profiles, a surge of creators monetizing their content, and a new generation of workers entering the labor market who are more entrepreneurial-minded than any that came before them.

The 3-bucket exercise starts with a simple shift. Stop thinking about your job as a title and start thinking about it as a set of tasks. For solopreneurs, that’s actually intuitive thinking.

You’re already bouncing between customer engagement, marketing, business development, and a dozen other things in a single day. The exercise becomes especially powerful for you because your time is your most valuable resource.

A large enterprise can afford wasted cycles. You can’t. So, the goal is to identify which tasks you can hand off to AI, freeing up your brainpower for the highest-leverage work. Not just staying afloat with today’s customer needs, but looking around the corner to position yourself for long-term growth.

We’ve been fed a false notion that this is humans versus AI. The better frame is humans with AI versus humans without AI. There is no such thing as an AI-powered business without a human behind it.

Anyone who makes their livelihood off their expertise has a moat that AI simply can’t replicate: the rooms you’ve been in, the track record of wins and losses you’ve learned from, the relationships you’ve built, how you listen to clients and make them feel seen in difficult moments.

AI can close a lot of expertise gaps quickly. But it’s ultimately not the expert you are. The work for solopreneurs right now is getting really good at articulating that story of self, and then using AI to sharpen and amplify it.

Start small, but start. Find one part of your day you hate doing and see if AI can take it on. You don’t have to overhaul everything overnight.

But be clear-eyed about this: we are in a new world, and what got you here is not going to get you there. Your clients are already going to expect you’re on the cutting edge.

And the longer you wait for this change to come to you, the less agency you have over it. The solopreneurs who are going to win in this era are the ones who decide to steer rather than wait.

This shift was already in motion, but AI is accelerating it. We have long thought of careers as ladders, but they’re really climbing walls now.

You can go up, down, sideways, and back again depending on where opportunity shows up. And AI dramatically lowers the cost of pivoting. You can enter a new field, pick up adjacent skills, and launch a new offering faster than ever before.

The youngest generation of workers is already living this: they’re on pace to hold twice as many jobs over their careers as the generation before them, and 73% of Gen Z professionals already have multiple income streams compared to 56% of Gen X.

What used to be a deliberate structural choice for solopreneurs is becoming the default way careers work, because AI makes it viable for far more people to build and sustain income across multiple areas of expertise.

Think of LinkedIn as the world of work’s classroom. Curate your feed intentionally: who you follow, what brands you engage with, what content you put out there all help personalize it for your actual needs.

And we’ve just announced a set of new tools built specifically for founders and small business owners including a new AI-powered hiring experience, Advice Sessions to monetize your expertise through paid one-on-one sessions, and competitor analytics to benchmark against others in your space.

These tools are designed to give independent professionals the kind of infrastructure that used to only be available to big companies.

There’s no silver bullet that works for every founder or every business.

But here’s a good benchmark — if you’re using AI tools every day to either take one thing off your plate or take a business idea to the next stage, you’re on track. Keep experimenting.

And talk to other founders and peers on LinkedIn. Some of the best learning right now is coming from peers in your industry sharing what’s actually working.

There has never been a better time to be a builder. The AI era was made for people like you. You can move faster than big companies. You can experiment more.

And the entrepreneurial mindset, knowing your story of self, being willing to put yourself out there and explain your value, is about to become the defining skill for all of us. You already have it.

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