Skills-as-a-Service: The Next Great Gold Rush (And Why You Can’t Sit This One Out)
- Rich Washburn
- 3 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Let’s start with a truth that’s equal parts uncomfortable and undeniable: If you’ve got deep expertise in anything — consulting, medicine, engineering, marketing, welding, whatever — you’re training your replacement right now.
And no, not the human one. The AI one.
Projects like Argentum (Bloomberg’s scoop about hundreds of ex-McKinsey, Bain, and BCG consultants training AI to do entry-level consulting) and Project Mercury (ex-bankers teaching financial modeling to models) are just the tip of the spear. These aren’t isolated experiments — they’re prototypes of a future where every skill, every technique, every bit of professional “secret sauce” gets digitized, encoded, and scaled.
That’s the quiet revolution happening right now — and it’s moving fast.
We used to train our replacements overseas.Now we’re training them in silicon.
The question is: Will you own the version that replaces you — or will you just help build it for someone else?
For Executives, This Is the Clock Ticking
If you’re a high performer, a leader, a subject-matter expert — there’s a timer on your magic. The unique blend of intuition, muscle memory, and judgment that makes you exceptional is the very thing AI is learning right now.
It’s not if someone models your domain. It’s when.
Here’s the kicker: the people who see it early — the ones who productize their skillsets — will make more in the next five years packaging what they know than they did in the last twenty practicing it.
This is the next SaaS wave — Skills-as-a-Service. Not Software-as-a-Service. You. As. A. Service.
Your frameworks, your methods, your mental models — turned into workflows, prompts, and systems that others can use, scale, and pay for.
It’s not a threat. It’s an exit strategy.
The playbook is simple:
Codify your genius — document your unique process and judgment calls.
Train your digital twin — use AI to simulate how you think.
Monetize the model — build it into a tool, training system, or subscription product that scales without you.
The future of consulting, coaching, analysis, design, and leadership isn’t just about doing — it’s about encoding.
For Everyone Else: This Is the Opportunity of a Lifetime
For the rest of the world — the freelancers, creators, entrepreneurs, tinkerers — this is your in.
This is the gold rush moment you’ve been waiting for.
All those side hustles that felt “not worth the squeeze”? The ideas that were just out of reach because you didn’t have the capital, team, or tech chops?That friction is gone.
AI tools just leveled the playing field. You can now spin up a business, app, or automation overnight — without code, without capital, without permission.
You don’t have to build the next billion-dollar platform. You just need to build the mini-SaaS version of yourself — the version that can sell your knowledge, automate your process, or amplify your creativity while you sleep.
That’s the move. That’s the loop.
You take your unique expertise, your life’s work, and you teach it to the machine — before someone else does.
This Is Why I Teach Builders
This isn’t theory for me — this is the work I live in every day. I build builders.
Because this new world doesn’t reward passive observers; it rewards participants. The ones who get their hands dirty. The ones who understand that learning how to orchestrate AI — to “vibe code,” as I like to say — is the most valuable meta-skill of the decade.
I’ve seen it firsthand:
“Life-changing experience with Rich. I just spent three hours with Rich, and he completely blew my mind. I went in thinking I’d learn a few things about AI, but instead I walked out seeing the world differently... I left our session feeling unstoppable—full of ideas, clarity, and excitement about what’s possible.”— Erin, Corporate Education, Entrepreneur
And again:
“When Rich told me I’d be running the app myself, I thought, no way—that’s not happening... Within a week, I went from overwhelmed to confidently building, breaking, and fixing... What we built in a few weeks actually outperformed the $250,000 CRM we had before... He turned ‘totally impossible’ into ‘yeah, that’s my jam’ in under a month.”— Michael Williams, Engineering & Renewables
That’s the new reality. The tools are here. The opportunity is now.
Final Thought
This is not just an AI revolution. It’s a knowledge revolution.
Every profession, every industry, every skill is about to become modular, scalable, and tradable. Your expertise — your magic — can either become a product you own or a dataset someone else monetizes.
If you’re an executive, it’s time to design your digital legacy.If you’re a builder, it’s time to build your SaaS — Skills-as-a-Service.
Because the future doesn’t belong to the smartest person in the room anymore. It belongs to the one who teaches the machine how to think like them.
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