I was in college in the late 90s when the internet hit.

I had the skills to be in front of it. I’d hand-coded binary to pass the entry-level computer science courses (the professors made us. They wanted to weed people out.) I learned Visual Basic when it was the thing. I got Cisco certified. I passed CCNA, the whole network security stack. I had certifications nobody my age had.

And I missed it.

Not because I didn’t have the talent. Not because I didn’t have the intellect. Not because I didn’t have the skills. I had all three.

I missed it because I listened to the wrong voices.

The voices in the late 90s sounded like this:

“The internet is going to destroy real businesses.”

“Nobody is actually going to shop online. You can’t touch the product.”

“This is a bubble. It’s going to pop and these kids are going to be looking for real jobs.”

“The internet is making everyone lazy and stupid.”

“Email is going to ruin actual communication.”

Some of those people were sincere. Some were terrified of change. Some were standing on the runway pretending the plane wasn’t taking off. All of them were wrong.

The honest question I should have been asking myself in 1998 was not “is the internet good for humanity?” It was a different question. A more useful question.

Is it inevitable?

That was the question. That is always the question.

The internet was inevitable. Whether it made us better or worse as a species was a separate conversation. Maybe both. Probably both. But it was happening either way. The people who got in front of it during that 1998 to 2003 window built the next twenty years of the economy. The people who waited until 2008 to start figuring it out were always going to be behind. The people who waited until 2015 might as well have not bothered.

I waited.

I had the skills. I had the certifications. I had everything I needed. I had the wrong question rattling around in my head (“but is this actually GOOD though?”). By the time I realized the answer to that question didn’t matter, the train had already left the station.

That’s why I’m writing this issue.

Because I am watching small business owners do the same thing right now with AI.

They are asking the wrong question.

The question is not “is AI good for humanity?” I don’t know the answer to that question. I have my own doubts about a lot of it. Most of the people pushing AI hardest have never met a payroll. The art bots are taking work from real artists. Deepfakes are about to make trust impossible. Massive companies are about to fire 30% of their workforce.

I am not pretending any of that is fine.

But here’s the question that begs to be asked:

Is AI inevitable?

Yes. It is.

It is here. It is not going anywhere. It is changing how customers find businesses, how content gets recommended, how decisions get made, every single day. The percentage of search happening through AI tools instead of Google grew faster in the last 18 months than the entire smartphone-search transition took from 2007 to 2015. It is a wave. It is rolling. It does not need our permission.

And once you accept that AI is inevitable, the question changes.

The question becomes: am I going to be in front of it, or am I going to wait until 2030 and try to catch up the way I tried to catch up on the internet in 2008?

I am not making that mistake twice.

I built Lefty Media Co specifically because I saw the AI search shift coming and I knew, deep in the part of my brain that still remembers what 1998 felt like, that this was the same wave. Different platform. Same wave. And small businesses were going to be the ones who got buried under it unless somebody who actually cared was deploying the right stack for them at a price they could afford.

That is the founding story. That is why this thing exists. That is what is driving every line of code, every audit, every newsletter issue, every conversation I have with a prospect.

I do not know if AI is good for humanity.

I do know it is inevitable.

And I do know that if you are a small business owner reading this, you have a six-to-twelve-month window before AI search becomes the dominant way new customers find businesses in your category. After that window closes, the businesses that are already cited will keep being cited because AI platforms favor consistency. The businesses that are not will be invisible. That is the math.

You don’t have to be excited about AI. You don’t have to think it’s saving the world. You just have to look at the runway and decide whether you’re going to be on the plane or watching it leave.

In 1998 I watched the plane leave.

I’m not watching it leave this time.

If you want to see where you stand right now with the AI tools your future customers are using, my free scan is at https://scan.leftymediaco.com. Takes 30 seconds. No email required.