Age of Ultron - Why I Let AI Into My Life (And Why You Should, Too)

Some of you may remember the 2015 Marvel Cinematic Universe movie Avengers: Age of Ultron , where Tony Stark inadvertently created a super AI called Ultron who turned against him and all of mankind. This is the age of AI, and for many, it carries a similar fear. But I believe the future is not about takeover; it's about conscious integration. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Age Of Ultron Poster from Marvel.com The world is a noisy place, and the technology landscape is noisier still. My personal journey with AI is a story of progression: from a Casual User who generates content, to a Power User who leverages AI to learn, and finally, to a Super User who integrates it to overhaul and transform output. Before that, some history (mine). In the mid-90s, as a young legal counsel for Petronas, I was in the Y2K Task Force, advising on the potential legal implications of both rectifying the Y2K computational issues as well as protecting the company’s position in the event of a Y2K event. Thankfully, nothing happened when the click struck 12 midnight on Jan 1 2000. I then witnessed first-hand the rise of the dot-com era in the early 2000. I saw how new technologies could fundamentally alter the way we do business, and it compelled me to jump from law to IT strategy and implementation. Moving first as a founder to iPerintis and then as part of the team to deliver (and subsequenty salvage) ePerolehaan to the Federal Government under the Multimedia Super Corridor Flagship applications. But even then, while technology was an important part of my life, it wasn't yet critical to my thinking. I dabbled and It became an enabler for me. That all changed in 2022. On November 30th of that year, OpenAi released ChatGPT as a ‘free research preview’ and the world moved into the age of Artificial Intelligence. I think for many people, the journey with AI begins with a simple, passive curiosity—what I’d call the Casual User stage.

You use ChatGPT for a simple task; rephrase a paragraph, summarise a passage, draft a reply to an email. That’s what I did back then. I was also in the final stages of my Master's in Sustainable Development Management (MSDM) and I used ChatGpt as a teaching assistant. But two key triggers not only convinced me to go deeper—they showed me what a true AI-augmented future could look like. Stage 1: The Casual User's Wake-Up Call Firstly I was catching up with a consultant friend Hasan Shafi who had a layover in KL and we were discussing the prospects of management consulting. I was considering a return to management consulting, specializing in sustainable development as I had just completed the MDSM from the Jeffrey Sachs Center For Sustainable Development at Sunway University. He was telling me that in the current environment of management consulting, a deep understanding of AI is no longer a luxury—it’s in high demand as more and more companies were starting to take note of the power of AI. This reminded me of the dotcom era of the 2000s and the projects I was involved in. It made me realize I could leverage my background in law, large scale IT implementation, change management and my new found qualification in Sustainable Development to provide a unique and therefore valuable proposition. Second, Sam Altman of OpenAI spoke of a future where a solo entrepreneur could build a billion-dollar company, completely augmented by AI https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelashley/2025/02/17/the-future-is-solo-ai-is-creating-billion-dollar-one-person-companies/ “We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon…in my little group chat with my tech CEO friends there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen.” - Sam Altman The idea of using AI to exponentially increase my output and achieve things I couldn't do alone within a short span of time resonated deeply. I may not build a billion-dollar company, but I am committed to discovering for myself exactly how I can use AI to force multiply my own abilities.

Stage 2: Becoming a Power User of Learning The first step in my transformation was to understand AI and have it augment my learning. I had already used AI as a teaching assistant for my MSDM studies. But it wasn’t really a teaching assistant. It was more of a super search engine that allowed me to go through large volumes of data and information. It was essentially making things go faster for me. As part of a lifelong goal, I started Harvard's CS50x program https://pll.harvard.edu/course/cs50-introduction-computer-science to learn how to code in C and Python (something I highly recommend everyone to do. Why? Thats another article). The CS50X programs provides you with https://cs50.ai which is what Harvard Professor David Malan calls the intelligent 1 to 1 tutor for CS50X. Yes. This is an AI but whats different about CS50.AI as compared to Chatgpt is that it is designed to behave as a teacher who guides rather than as a repository of knowledge who answers (watch the highly recommended video on this ) https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ggshaJcOc6Y?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0 Watch how they developed it in this video below👇🏼. https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/FgKE9U4Tyd8?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0 So this is the first time for me that Ai adopted a role to be more ‘human-like’ and it blew me away. Instead of giving me answers to my questions, it would reply ‘why don’t you tell me what you think first and we’ll take it from there’. The impact of this learning was immediate. My final project for CS50X was to develop a personal AI assistant using my own prompts—and that was a true turning point. It made me understand how AI is developed, how LLMs work, machine learning, generative AI, the power of APIs and now MCPs. It gave me a glimpse to how someone like me, a novice programmer can start architecting and designing AI assistants and AI agents. Right now, I am researching my PhD research proposal. Tools like NotebookLM have changed my process entirely. Before, it would have taken me at minimum a full day to read and comprehend one academic paper. Now, I can interact with the document in Notebook LM and through questions, shift my learning from a passive act to an active and engaging one.

This is the essence of being a power user: using AI to "force multiply" your ability to learn and digest information. Stage 3: The Super User and Conscious Integration Back to Sam Altman and the solo entrepreneur. How does that work actually? How could someone like me turn from a average solo entrepreneur to for lack of another term a billion dollar entrepreneur. That same article alluded to developing AI team members to brainstorm with and seek ideas and guidance. When I needed to do something on my own (especially things I’m not familiar with), I would start reading and researching. Using Google Search and Youtube. If I needed to develop a marketing campaign, I would find the best resources, try to digest it, follow the steps and hopefully produce an output. It was slow. It was tedious. And I began to read about people and their teams of AIs so I decided to build one. I began to develop a team of AI assistants on Gemini, each with a specific purpose built from my prompts I copied from others (thank you Lyra) and tweaked for my own purposes:

Samantha for brand strategy
Skynet as a business consultant
Ava for productivity
Hal to assist with my PhD research preparation
WOPR (prononced WOPper) as my coding assistant.
Seven as my Consulting Partner

They have since become invaluable advisors that provide me with clarity and structure. Screenshot of my AI Assistants And thus I progressed to the Super User stage—the conscious integration of AI into my output and strategy. It wasnt just me as a solo entrepenuer. It was me and my AI team and there was (and is) nothing that we can’t handle.

Challenge: My personal AI team’s names are not random. They come from movies and TV shows that feature AI as a major theme. I’ve always been fascinated with how media portrays AI. Can you figure out their origins?

The tangible impact has been profound. While my company had become stagnant during my Master's program, what would have taken me weeks to develop a rejuvenation plan, marketing strategy, and website makeover, I was able to accomplish in just a few days with Skynet by my side. This is what it means to be a super user: using AI to overcome inertia and achieve a level of output that was once impossible. Whilst this was already a leap forward, the next step is the most crucial one: The Ultra User Stage 4: The Ultra User (My Next Frontier) This is a stage where AI moves beyond being a personal assistant and becomes an autonomous agent that works seamlessly in the background. It manages administrative tasks and fully automates complex workflows, such as sales. While I am in the early stages of this journey, the potential is undeniable. I do have anxieties about surrendering control, and I'm not yet ready to let an AI manage my Gmail inbox. But that anxiety is part of the learning process. I'm currently educating myself on how to use tools like N8N and similar platforms to take this next logical step toward a truly augmented solo entrepreneur. The highly anticipated release of Google Opal is also central to my thinking, and I am waiting for its public release. One Piece of Advice for the Journey Ahead At 54 years old, I'm often asked how I continue to learn and embrace new challenges. My personal philosophy is simple: Make Everything A Learning Experience. The volatility of the AI landscape is a source of anxiety for many, but it's precisely why we must be proactive. So, for anyone who is hesitant or unsure about their own AI journey, my advice is to follow this progression: Don't get lost in the noise. The world of AI is moving fast, with new tools constantly being announced. Instead, choose an environment (like I did with Google Workspace) and commit to mastering it. Build your own foundational appreciation for what AI can do to augment your personal output.

Because if you don't first learn how to use AI to force multiply your own abilities, how can you expect to lead a team or an organization to do the same? In my next article, I’m going to write about my AI Team and how I developed them. P.S. This piece was written by me assisted by Samantha , my branding AI. Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.