Essay
The Edge Goes to Who Trains the AI, Not Who Commands It
What if the winners in this economy are not the people who command AI, but the ones who train it?
Twilio’s 20% quarter is what that looks like when the bet pays off, and in an After Earnings interview, Ann Berry and CEO Khozema Shipchandler name the reason plainly: AI is a labor resource. The more you teach it, the more you can trust it to do.
Training beats commanding
The instinct most people bring to these tools is to boss them around — to type an order the way you’d bark one at a person and expect obedience. That is the low-ceiling way to use them. The real skill is quieter: laying a path that feeds the system data no human could gather by hand, then giving it room to work.
Point it outward and it reaches across the internet through your own API keys, data feeds, and a browser it can drive itself. Point it inward and it moves into your operation — or your home — working across your tools the way a capable second set of hands would.
Trust is the whole thing
Here is where a fiduciary’s instincts turn out to be the right ones. The hesitation people feel about handing an AI their keys, their data, and a door into their world is completely fair — it is the same hesitation you should feel before handing anyone that access. But the discipline that makes delegation safe is not secrecy; it is structure: clear scope, good records, defined authority, and verification. The same things that make a trustee trustworthy make an AI system usable.
That hesitation is quietly becoming a dividing line — between the people who learn to structure this delegation and use it to build and produce, and the people who freeze and get left in conspicuous consumption. The technology rewards the person who can define a duty and trust a system to carry it. That is a muscle I’ve been building my whole career, in uniform and out of it.
The tool is a labor resource. What you get out of it depends entirely on how well you teach it — and how honestly you scope what you’ve handed over.
Source: Twilio CEO on the Company’s Turnaround Strategy, AI-Powered Communication & the Robocall Problem (After Earnings / Morning Brew). Opinion; my own views.