I want to tell you about April 4, 2023.
The day I did something a little crazy.
Before I showed my team a single thing — I made them sign an NDA. A voice NDA. Recorded in Otter.ai — itself an AI tool — before a training on how to use AI.
Even I had to laugh at that one.
Until now, this has been confidential. This is the first time I am sharing what happened inside that training — and what it built inside my business.
I was using it by January. Training my team by April.
OpenAI officially launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. My mentor Jarad — CTO of Brain Robotics at the time, today CTO of Humanoid.ai — texted me that week:
"This is going to completely change how people work. This is urgent."
I trusted that. He had been right every time before.
I did not wait for the trend.
I did not wait for the tutorial.
I did not wait for it to feel safe.
Here is what the timeline actually looked like:
- January 2023 — I start using ChatGPT personally
- February 1 — ChatGPT Plus launches. Jarad says pay the $20. I do.
- February 28 — I open a dedicated business account
- March 15 — I upgrade to Plus for business use
- March 30 — I implement Otter.ai as our AI meeting assistant — way before Microsoft Copilot existed
- April 4, 2023 — I deliver the first confidential ChatGPT training to my entire team
Four months after launch. Most businesses had not even opened a free account.
I built the training myself. There was no playbook.
No course. No consultant. No playbook — because in early 2023, there was no playbook.
I already had every SOP in my business mapped. Every gate. Every handoff. Every step that was slowing us down. I went through each one and asked one question:
Where does this take the longest — and can this technology cut it in half?
Not theory. A process audit. Every department. Every bottleneck.
That is what I trained my team on. Not "here is a cool tool." Here is exactly where it fits inside the work we are already doing — and here is the time it gives you back.
I was born in Brazil. Portuguese is my first language. For years, nothing left our business without a final review at the gate. We planned content a week out just to fit that step in. The first time I ran that process through ChatGPT — twenty minutes. The whole workflow changed.
Study cases from real client work. Prompt engineering. SOPs. Crisis management. One person at a time.
Here is what actually happened.
Thirteen people trained since April 4, 2023. Every person who joined — trained. Every person who left and was replaced — the new one got trained too. Not in a workshop. Inside the work. While we were doing the work.
One of the clients I used as a training case was a construction company. I told my team: the way people search is going to completely change. AI will replace Google for discovery. We need to be there first.
Today, that client ranks as the first result in ChatGPT. I wrote an article about this two years ago. It is still on my LinkedIn.
One copywriter quit. Said AI was not aligned with how she worked. I told her: I still need you — but I need you to use this. It is the standard now. She left. The next copywriter I hired listed ChatGPT on her resume, under skills. I hired her in the first five minutes of the interview.
The training cost me a team member. I did not flinch.
From that point on, AI training became part of onboarding. Every person who joined learned our tools, our SOPs, and our AI stack on day one. Not optional. Not eventually. In their first week.
This was never an experiment. It was an operating principle.
Look at how fast this is actually moving.
Here is what nobody tells you about early AI adoption. It is not comfortable. It is not trendy.
Our grandparents took years to learn computers. Then the internet. Then smartphones. Not because they were not smart — because change is uncomfortable. That is human nature.
I did not know these numbers when I was making my decisions in 2023. But looking back — the pattern is undeniable.
- 1984 — Apple Macintosh launches. The personal computer becomes accessible to everyday people.
- 1995 — Commercial internet explodes. 11 years after the personal computer.
- 2007 — iPhone launches. The smartphone era begins. 12 years after the internet.
- 2022 — ChatGPT launches. Generative AI becomes accessible to everyone. 15 years after the smartphone.
- 2025–2026 — The Agentic AI era begins. AI that does not just answer — it acts, builds, executes entire workflows. Less than 4 years after ChatGPT.
You did not need to see this coming in 2022. But you need to see it now.
Each shift is faster than the last. What used to take a decade now takes four years. The window to get ahead of a technology shift is compressing — fast.
And the people who resisted the computer? They lost their jobs. Not to the computer. To the person sitting next to them who learned it first.
AI is the same shift. Except it is happening at a speed we have never seen before.
If you work for a company and want a promotion — the person who gets it is the one who delivers above and beyond. AI lets you get there. Way faster. Way further.
If you run a business — imagine every person on your team operating at that level. That is not a dream. That is a choice.
Early AI adoption = opportunity > income in the beginning. Every time — until the income catches up with the culture you built.
This is where I come from.
Three years of the same pattern: something new launches, I learn it, I teach myself, I implement it, I shift. Always on top. As a non-technical founder — that is not an accident.
My dad was born before computers existed. When they came to Brazil, they were so scarce and expensive that most people could not afford one. So he bought one — took it completely apart, learned every chip, every board, every piece of where it belonged — and built another one. And another. Until he understood it well enough to build an entire technology department for the Brazilian government from the ground up.
Then he started teaching his friends — the ones who were struggling financially — how to do the same so they could build computers and sell them too.
Nobody taught him. He figured it out and then turned around and taught everyone else.
That is the root cause of why I am the way I am with technology.
I am forever grateful to this man. He showed me his passion for technology — and that became mine.
And that is why 13 people learned AI inside my business before most companies even started the conversation.
The window is open. Right now.
This is not a post about ChatGPT. It is a post about what happens when you move first.
AI is going into every device, every platform, every industry, every job. The question is not whether it will affect your work. The question is whether you will be ahead of it or behind it when it does.
If you are a founder trying to figure out where AI fits inside your actual operations — not the hype, the real implementation — that is exactly what I help people build. Work with me →
Want to understand the full picture of this journey? Read my story →
The window is open. Right now.