Your value grows when you learn how to combine AI with what only you can do as a human.

 

Nikki Barua, author, speaker and CEO & Co-Founder of FlipWork joined me on Get Ready Before Before Life Happens to talk about how AI is transforming how we work, earn, and create value.

 

Nikki shares how individuals and advisors can stay relevant by reinventing themselves, developing AI fluency and focusing on the skills that remain distinctly human. From empathy and judgment to action and accountability, this conversation explores how to thrive in an AI-driven world.

 

Key Takeaways

 

🔹 AI is accelerating change and expanding what’s possible.

🔹 Reinvention is an ongoing process.

🔹 Knowledge alone does not create results, action does.

🔹 AI can expand access to tools, intelligence, and opportunity.

🔹 Empathy, judgment, coaching, and accountability become more valuable as technology advances.

🔹 Advisors evolve from experts to guides and accountability partners.

🔹 Investing in yourself creates long-term advantage.

 

🧠 Tony’s Take: AI amplifies human potential. You are your biggest asset. The opportunity is to use AI for what it does well while strengthening the judgment, empathy, curiosity, and relationships that only you can bring.

 

 🎥 Watch this episode below: 

 

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or on your favorite podcast app. 

 

Connect with Nikki Barua: 

 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkibarua/
• Personal Website: https://www.nikkibarua.com
• Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkibarua/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thenikkibarua/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thenikkibarua
• Newsletter: https://www.nikkibarua.com/newsletters/reinvention-roadmap/subscribe
• Personal Website: https://www.nikkibarua.com/
• Flipwork Company Website: https://www.flipwork.ai/

 

Books: 

 

• Beyond Barriers: How to Unlock Your Limitless Potential (Amazon)

 

Resources mentioned: 

 

• FlipFactor™ Diagnostic: https://flipfactor.ai 

 

Bio: 

 

Nikki Barua is a serial entrepreneur, keynote speaker, bestselling author, and globally recognized expert on transformation. She is the CEO & Co-Founder of FlipWork, the human + agentic system for workforce reinvention.

 

For over 25 years, Nikki has helped global brands reinvent their culture, capabilities, and competitive edge. Her work spans strategy, digital transformation, and organizational change,rooted in a belief that people, not just technology are the key to future success.

 

Nikki has built and scaled high-growth businesses as a tech entrepreneur, earning accolades for her visionary leadership and impact. Her personal journey of rising from humble beginnings has made her a sought-after voice on resilience and reinvention. Her story has been featured in CNBC, Bloomberg, Fortune, and Forbes.

 

Nikki has been named Entrepreneur of the Year by ACE, honored as an EY North America Entrepreneurial Winning Woman, included in Entrepreneur Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Women, recognized as one of the 21 Leaders for the 21st Century, and celebrated as a Woman of Influence by The Business Journals, and Top Entrepreneur by Comerica Bank & LA Lakers.

 

👉 Start Your Financial Readiness Plan: A free, practical plan that helps you create your in-case-of-emergency Financial First Aid Kit, organize what matters, and prepare before life happens. Start Your Free Financial Readiness Plan  https://www.tonysteuer.com

 

👉 Support the Mission: Become a Get Ready Insider and receive access to the Get Ready Library while helping support my mission to help people prepare before life happens. Become a Get Ready Insider  https://www.tonysteuer.com/get-ready-insider

 

 

Episode Transcript

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tony: Get Ready: Before Life Happens, the podcast helping you navigate life’s what-ifs.

AI isn’t just changing how we work. It’s changing how we earn, how we learn, and how we think about value. Some see disruption. Others see opportunity.

Today, I’m joined by Nikki Barua.

Nikki, welcome to Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Nikki: I’m so excited to be here, Tony. This is going to be a great conversation.

Tony: I’m excited to have you, and I’m honored to have you on the show.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. What is your origin story, and how did it lead you to focus on transformation in an AI-driven world?

Nikki: The through line of my entire story, both life and career, has been all about reinvention.

As an immigrant who came to the United States with very few resources or relationships, I had to really figure out how to reinvent myself and become relevant and valuable in this market.

I built up my corporate career helping some of the world’s most iconic brands adapt to change and transform their culture and capabilities using technology. That’s what I did for many years.

At the height of my corporate career, I walked away from it all to pursue my entrepreneurial dreams. In the last 15-plus years, I’ve built and scaled multiple businesses.

Even as an entrepreneur, I had to reinvent myself again because the things you learn in corporate America don’t always translate into who you need to become as an entrepreneur.

Ultimately, the through line of all of that has been that change is constant.

Change is happening even faster and is more intense in terms of scope and scale. The one trait that helps you make it through all of these shifts is being agile and adaptable.

If you can figure out how to adapt to any kind of change and constantly reinvent yourself to align with the future, the opportunity is limitless.

What brought me to this place as the founder of Flipwork really emerged from a challenge I saw so many people around the world struggling with.

AI is changing things faster than anyone anticipated and faster than anyone can keep up with. It’s just not normal for us to deal with that kind of change, and yet we’re not quite sure how to adapt to it.

Most of the solutions out there are basic AI training and basic AI tools. They’re not preparing people to reinvent how they think, how they learn, and how they work.

That’s what Flipwork was founded to help address: closing that divide where humanity gets left behind and replaced by technology.

Instead, humans are amplified by partnering with AI and becoming exponentially capable.

Tony: That’s amazing.

Of course, everybody is thinking about this. It’s top of mind. Some people are tuning out and burying their heads in the sand, while others are saying, “Okay, how do I amplify myself through AI?”

Let’s talk about that. What do you mean when you say humans are amplified by AI?

Nikki: When you think about our traditional ways of working and what made us valuable in the market, it was because you had a certain set of skills, competencies you had developed, experience, and expertise that you brought to the table.

A lot of those areas are effectively things that AI models can now do better, faster, and cheaper than a human can.

Whether you look at software development, financial analysis, or even things like copywriting, AI can do a pretty great job. It generally produces average to above-average output.

If you’re someone whose entire livelihood depended on doing things that AI has now automated and can do basically for free instead of for your six-figure salary, you’ve effectively made yourself replaceable.

The question then becomes: If the machine can do what I had been doing, what do I do now? How do I reinvent where I create value? What kind of problems do I solve? What makes me irreplaceable?

That’s the real question for people to answer.

The path to doing that is finding the areas that only humans can do and machines cannot.

Let’s take being a financial advisor.

AI can certainly build financial models and maybe even design a portfolio based on your risk tolerance and all of those things because those are analytical and computational.

But what it cannot do is look your client in the eyes when they’re going through a difficult circumstance or financial setback, connect with them from a place of empathy and deep caring, reassure them, and give them hope.

That is something no AI model can do.

When you think about what you need to amplify, you want to amplify the things that only humans can do.

That gives us a way of creating value instead of competing with the machine.

Tony: That’s something I’ve explored quite a bit on the podcast in other conversations.

That’s what a lot of the conversation has been in the financial planning community because AI models can do a really good job overall with creating a financial plan, which has been automated for the most part anyway for years using different software platforms.

That’s nothing new.

But in terms of managing the portfolio and everything else, AI is really, as you point out, stepping up with those things that are more analytically based.

As you say, there’s a role for humans as more of coaches.

I’m actually releasing an episode this week about how advisors are transforming into coaches.

Do you think that’s where financial planners and other advisors should be thinking about moving, more toward a coaching viewpoint and being in the client’s corner?

Nikki: That’s a great question.

The analogy I would draw is very similar to fitness.

Much like wealth creation, the formula is pretty straightforward: make more, spend less, invest the difference.

It’s not that complicated.

If you are consistent with that and you have compounding that keeps growing your wealth over time, you’re pretty well set.

So why is it that people don’t operate that way? Why do they make decisions that are counter to that?

It has nothing to do with the equation.

It has to do with mindset, conditioning, limiting beliefs, and so forth.

The same is true for fitness.

The formula for being physically fit is fewer calories in, more calories out, stay active, eat healthy, avoid toxins, get good sleep. It’s pretty straightforward.

Even if you look at nutrition planners, meal planners, exercise regimens, and all of that, there are lots of apps that can do those things.

Why don’t people just follow the formula?

Because it’s not about the equation.

It’s about mindset and needing a guide who inspires hope and trust in you, someone who holds you accountable and guides you along the way.

That’s why I feel this industry and profession are going to move further away from the mechanics and more toward relationship dynamics, influence, and accountability that a human-to-human relationship provides.

Frankly, that’s the hardest part to solve.

If shifting beliefs and mindset were easy, we would all be billionaires just from following the formula and doing the logical thing.

But we don’t.

Tony: It’s always been about the people.

The most successful advisors I know, whether they’re attorneys, financial planners, insurance agents, or whatever field you look at, are the ones who are called rainmakers.

They’ve always been the people who have been able to form the best relationships, network the best, and have those human skills.

They’ve been the ones who have been most successful over the years.

I definitely see it trending that way as well.

Let’s talk a little bit about financial literacy.

How do you see AI impacting financial literacy, access, and inclusion?

Nikki: It’s a very positive move in the right direction because access is no longer gating intelligence.

When intelligence is freely available, you can have more abundance and more prosperity.

What used to be the domain of only those with high net worth who could afford a financial planner or advisor, or had access to certain investable funds and things like that, is now much more democratized.

Today, you can ask ChatGPT for advice and at least know the basics of how to get started.

It’s no longer as much of a limiting factor for people.

From a financial literacy standpoint, I’m extremely hopeful that this leads to more awareness, not just of what to do, but what not to do, and hopefully leads people to better decisions.

The biggest challenge, as always, is not about knowledge.

It’s about action.

All the knowledge in the world, even if you can get it for free from AI instead of through a paid financial advisor, isn’t going to change your life unless you take action.

That is a personal prerogative.

Tony: I think that circles back to what we were talking about a minute ago.

The role of a coach is to get you to take action.

We have a trainer. I know how to do the exercises and all those things, but it’s nice to have a trainer come in every couple of weeks to hold me accountable and make sure that I am taking action and taking action correctly.

I think one challenge with AI is that, from what I understand, a lot of it comes down to the prompts that you put in.

My whole point with the show is to help people ask better questions.

I think the same thing is true of AI. If we’re not asking AI the right questions, AI may go down a different path.

Are you seeing that as a potential issue with AI?

Nikki: It’s not an issue with AI.

It’s an issue with humans developing the skills to work well with AI.

It’s like any profession. You have to build competency in new areas.

My parents’ generation did not have to work with computers for most of their careers.

In my generation, I can’t imagine doing any work without a computer, but that’s a skill you had to learn.

AI is the same thing.

Because we’re at the early stages and a very small percentage of the global population is actually developing the right kind of AI fluency, most of the world is still behind.

Until you master those skills, whether it’s prompt engineering, learning how to automate workflows, or building agentic systems, you’re not going to get the full benefit of AI.

That’s why building these skills, regardless of which industry you’re in, has become table stakes.

It’s an urgent requirement because it’s like going into a field where you don’t speak the most dominant language.

You’re missing a tool that is preventing you not only from being relevant, but from actually creating more value for others.

Tony: I love that.

It is a skill you have to pick up just like anything else, and it’s a valuable skill.

There’s a price to pay if you don’t know how to use AI.

I’m not an AI genius by any means, but I know how to work with it at least.

For instance, my wife and son will ask me to use ChatGPT to help them accomplish certain things because I’ve learned how to do at least a minimal level of work with AI.

I can’t create an agent or all those things. I probably could if I spent some time on it.

My level is low, but I’m able to access it and at least get some benefit from it.

Nikki: The thing that most people are not recognizing is that AI model capabilities are growing exponentially week over week.

Every week there’s a new model version that gets released, and it’s more powerful than the previous model.

If you as a human, compared to that machine, are not growing at that same exponential rate, then every week the divide grows bigger.

This is not linear growth where you can say, “I’ll get around to it next week. I’ll learn some more skills with AI and develop my fluency.”

If you wait a month, you’re not just a month behind. You’re probably more like 12 months behind because of that exponential hockey-stick growth of the models and their capabilities.

That’s the divide we’re seeing so much in our work with clients.

We see lots of professionals and experts who have decades of deep experience.

Once they master these AI skills, the difference between them and their peers who don’t have the same skill set is night and day.

It’s unbelievable how much of a competitive advantage they have.

That’s why I believe that in the next two to three years, we’re going to see a huge shift in where market dominance lies between those who have mastered AI fluency on top of their core competencies and expertise and those who are still hesitating, waiting, and working with an old playbook.

Tony: I completely agree.

I’m even seeing it with some fintechs.

I’ve advised a couple of fintechs, so I keep on top of the fintech marketplace. You can definitely see the difference with fintechs that have implemented AI in a very smart way.

I think a lot of companies, and I’m sure you’ve seen this, just throw AI in there and say, “We’re using AI,” but there’s not really a plan for actually using it.

Saying you have an AI layer doesn’t really mean anything.

A lot of people who watch and listen to the show are running financial literacy programs, developing financial literacy workshops, or building apps.

How do you see them being able to introduce AI into their workflow or how they should think about it in terms of financial education?

It feels like, as you said, it could help more people gain access to financial literacy education.

Nikki: Regardless of the nature of your work, everyone follows the same process in terms of how to reinvent for AI.

This is really what our programs do.

Number one, break down your work into tasks.

How do you do your job day to day? How do you work with clients? How do you get clients? How do you do a financial planning meeting with them? How do you manage their portfolio?

Break down each of those things into a set of tasks.

Then figure out which of those tasks naturally lend themselves to leveraging AI, algorithms, or systems.

Then look at the pieces that only you can do.

For example, that first meeting with a prospect who’s looking to hire you as an advisor has to be you.

That meeting where a client is going through a difficult circumstance or has had a windfall and wants to figure out what to do with it, those are places where you want to focus on leading with your own zone of genius.

Everything else can lend itself to leveraging AI, even if you hadn’t considered it before.

What’s constantly surprising to me is that people have been doing things a certain way and really don’t believe they can leverage AI for them until you show it to them.

Then it’s, “Wow, this used to take 80 hours of work, and now it’s done in less than one minute.”

Think about how much time that releases in your day-to-day.

When you break your work down by tasks and think about which tasks and workflows you want to use AI for, that is time you want to reallocate to higher-value activities.

Your time is not valuable if you’re sitting and crunching numbers on a spreadsheet.

Your time is going to be super high value if you’re serving a customer in need.

That time reallocation is a place to really focus on investing your energy.

Tony: I think that makes a lot of sense.

As I think about people developing financial literacy programs and apps and doing workshops, it allows them to create more programs to serve more people.

Instead of doing a lot of that back-end creation work, they can be out there delivering programs and advocating for underserved communities.

Even in the U.S., financial literacy is still very low.

When we look at countries around the world, there are a lot of places where there are completely underserved populations.

I think AI can help reach those different communities.

It can also help with different types of learning.

Nikki: Totally.

Often, even if you know there’s an opportunity, you can’t get to it because you’re so busy trying to keep up with what’s already on your plate.

The first place to start is: How can you release 30 to 40 percent additional capacity just by leveraging AI for those parts of your job?

The moment you free up that kind of time, the big question becomes: How do you want to invest that time now?

What are the best uses of your time that you’re passionate about and that can serve your customers?

You talked earlier about the role of financial advisors becoming more coach-like.

But to be a coach, you need actual time.

You can’t do that if your calendar is so packed that you don’t have time to meet with anyone.

That’s an example of high-value work that only you can do.

Tony: That’s awesome.

I want to ask you a question, and if you’re not prepared to answer it, that’s fine.

A lot of the audience around the world that listens to the show is either with a government financial literacy program or works with governments to implement financial literacy programs.

How should governments think about using AI to grow financial literacy in their countries?

Around the world, for example, the UN has working groups that focus on financial literacy.

How can policymakers make sure AI is really helping the populations they’re supposed to be helping?

Nikki: From the perspective of policymakers and governments, especially around the world, I think of it as a step even before financial literacy, which is the impact that AI will have on the economics of any community or society.

We’re already seeing that in the U.S. with the number of companies that announce layoffs or are certainly hiring a lot less because they just don’t need as much capacity to do the same amount of work.

That has a real impact on people, their families, and their communities.

If you suddenly lose your livelihood, at that point you’re not even thinking about financial literacy. You’re thinking about survival.

When that happens at a pretty large scale, even if the long-term view is more prosperous, in the short term you can go through this pain of financial losses.

For policymakers, that’s the more urgent thing to figure out.

How do we close the gap for displaced workers?

How do you prepare young people who are graduating from college but finding it really difficult to land a job because there are fewer entry-level jobs available today?

What do you do for an older population that could be at risk of getting laid off and may not be able to find a job again because their skills feel irrelevant?

There are multiple segments of the population that are at risk because of all of this.

That’s the first place to start: How do you build policy for that?

Once that part is done, the financial literacy piece, I believe, will look very different in the next five to 10 years given all of these shifts.

Tony: I agree.

I think what AI can do is help integrate these programs and deliver them at greater scale.

One simple example is countries where people speak different languages.

Replicating programs in a different language used to take a lot of money to translate and recreate the program.

Or you can provide captions for people who are hearing impaired.

I think it frees up that ability to serve more people, and policymakers can think about it in that way as well.

One of the things you talk a lot about is abundance.

I love that you’re optimistic about AI.

We’ve talked about people losing jobs and things like that, so why do you feel AI can create abundance?

What is that going to look like practically for each of us?

Nikki: I think of abundance in three dimensions: time, intelligence, and access.

When you think about how AI creates abundance in terms of time, you’re able to let go of all of the grunt work that used to take up so much of your day.

All of the things that are repetitive, administrative, or routine.

That time can be reclaimed from low-value tasks and actually go toward relationship building, creativity, or even rest and recreation.

That’s the kind of abundance most people have not experienced before.

Think about how many people go through their work life feeling burned out and like there’s no end to it, where even the weekends are not enough reprieve.

Just the gift of time abundance, where your job can be done in less time and you have the choice of how you want to reallocate that time, is tremendous.

Second is intelligence.

Today, because of AI and the democratization of intelligence across so many different capabilities, even a small business owner, solopreneur, or financial advisor working by themselves has access to best-in-class business strategies, marketing campaign ideas, financial modeling, and things that might have taken a whole team of experts to do before that they couldn’t afford.

For a lot of people, they were operating with less.

AI puts this kind of superpower within reach of people who didn’t have that before.

Finally, I think of it in terms of access to opportunity.

Previously, there were gatekeepers based on wealth, connections, location, and all of those things.

Whether it was getting access to best-in-class financial advice, legal guidance, or even health and wellness information, there was an access problem.

AI has helped solve that too.

Today, you can get access to the kind of information and advice that previously might have only been available if you were working with Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley.

That’s huge.

To me, abundance is what happens when intelligence stops being scarce.

What AI has done is democratize intelligence, and that’s what brings in abundance.

Tony: I love that.

“Abundance happens when intelligence stops being scarce.”

I know AI saves me time.

One of the things I do is, if I don’t know how to do something, let’s say I’m building my website, instead of trying to go through all those help articles, I just ask ChatGPT, “I’m trying to do X. How do I do it?”

Right then, it gives me the answer.

I can say, “Give it to me step by step,” and I get it instead of spending 10 or 15 minutes poking around my website’s help page trying to figure out how to do something.

That’s a tremendous amount of time.

Let’s talk about abundance a little bit more from the perspective of people whose careers may disappear.

How can people move forward and rediscover their identity and purpose?

Nikki: Join Flipwork.

Tony: All right.

Nikki: That is literally what we help people do.

That’s why the work is so meaningful to us.

We are helping people regain their sense of self, worth, and value at a time when the market might have written them off and they look completely irrelevant and there’s no clear path forward.

The point of all of this is that reinvention is something people often did when life happened to them.

You got laid off, COVID happened, or some other disaster struck, and then you were forced to figure your way out of that.

What’s really important to understand now is: Don’t wait for external circumstances to reinvent yourself.

Do it to yourself.

Without that, and without reinvention being a continuous process, you are going to get left behind.

The path to doing that is really aligning to what your unique zone of genius is.

In what ways can you create disproportionate value that no one else, not just other people but machines, can take away from you?

Then how do you leverage the scale and speed that AI offers and use it to your advantage?

In the past, you might have only been able to reach customers in your neighborhood or local geography.

Today, you can reach people anywhere, and there are so many capabilities available to you.

But for that, you need to build the skills.

You need to shed the old playbook, unlearn the old ways, and really embrace what the path forward looks like.

Tony: I love that. That is so cool.

For people watching and listening, there will be a link to Flipwork so you can check it out.

Nikki: One thing I would recommend everyone do is take our proprietary diagnostic that measures AI readiness.

It’s incredibly powerful, and it also benchmarks your readiness against global averages.

That diagnostic is available for free at Flipwork.ai.

I’d highly recommend that people start with that because not only will you know where you stand, but you’ll know what your bottlenecks are, what’s holding you back, and where the biggest ROI opportunities are.

You’ll get a 15-page report that tells you exactly what to do next.

It’s a fantastic place to start because you can’t change something unless you know where you currently are.

Tony: I love that.

You can’t change something unless you know where you are.

I always say that’s why on a map it always has, “You are here.”

If you don’t know where you are...

Nikki: That’s a dig for gold here.

Tony: I love that.

For everybody watching and listening, there will be a link in the show notes to the diagnostic so you’ll be able to easily find it.

One last question before we start to close out.

Why do you feel that empathy is an advisor superpower?

Nikki: Because everything else, AI can model.

It can create a thousand different portfolio scenarios in seconds.

It can spot patterns faster than an individual can.

It can build a really advanced financial plan.

Data can only tell you what someone has, but empathy can tell you what they fear, what they dream about, and what they’re actually willing to do.

What no machine can do is step into the shoes of a financial advisor, sit with someone, understand the complexity of their real life, help them feel the courage to change and take action, and hold them accountable through the process.

That is absolutely irreplaceable.

Empathy is what turns financial advice from being just a transaction to being truly transformative.

I’ve experienced it firsthand in my relationship with my financial advisor too.

It’s certainly not the modeling and portfolio planning.

It’s having that person I can call through the ups and downs, who knows me, knows my life, knows how I’m wired, can guide me through that process, and inspires trust in myself and my future.

Tony: That’s awesome.

That’s where I feel as well.

That is something you add to the conversation by just being there, listening to someone, and expressing empathy and human emotion.

To wrap up, Nikki, I have what’s called the Get Ready Hot Take Trio.

These are three quick questions I ask all my guests.

The first one is: What’s one money myth you’re trying to break?

Nikki: A money myth?

Tony: Or AI myth. I’m sorry. What’s one AI myth you’re trying to break?

Nikki: The money myth I would say is that what has been a source of value in the past is still going to be true in the future.

I think this has been not just a step change. It’s been such a massive disruption that all the old playbooks are really becoming irrelevant.

You have to rethink and understand what stays true and what has changed dramatically.

When I think about an AI myth, it’s that your seniority or your experience protects you.

That is an area where I’ve seen it, frankly, be the most shaky.

People who have two or three decades of experience are in many ways more at risk because they’ve learned how to think, work, and lead in a pre-AI era.

They’ve built credentials and competencies in a pre-AI era.

Unless they make that shift and bridge to this new world, they’re really the most at risk.

Tony: That’s powerful.

I think that really sums it up.

You have to think about what you’re doing, what you bring to the table, what AI can do, what it can’t do, and figure out how to partner with AI, for lack of a better word.

Nikki, let’s go back in time.

If you could get out the time machine and go back knowing what you know now about AI, what advice would you give your younger self?

I guess we’d just have to go back two or three years for a radically different world.

Nikki: I actually got involved in AI in 1997, so pretty early.

It was nothing like what we have today.

But what that early exposure did for me was introduce me, for lack of a better way of saying it, to a life form, if you will, or a form of intelligence that was so powerful that there was no doubt in my mind that the future was about this kind of intelligence.

Even though I don’t come from a technical background and I’m not an engineer, it made me fall in love with the power of technology and specifically its ability to scale impact and influence.

That is one of the hardest things to do: have impact at scale.

What I’ve always loved about technology is that it can scale your impact regardless of where you are or where you started from.

The advice I would give to my younger self is: Don’t wait and see.

Jump in faster.

Jump in before you think you’re ready.

At times when I’ve done that, my life has been so much better for it.

At times when I’ve hesitated, I’ve missed that window of opportunity.

That advice is very relevant today for everyone who’s thinking, “I still have time. Let me wait and see. Let me wait until this is actually impacting my life or work.”

Don’t wait.

AI is about rolling up your sleeves. You’ve got to get your hands in the dirt.

This is not something you’re going to gain competency or confidence in by reading about it.

You just have to build.

That’s why my bet on the future is what I call the E-shaped builders who have multiple areas of deep expertise, but also have a level of fluency and confidence with AI to build things.

Whether it’s agentic systems or orchestrating AI tools, they have a doer mindset, not just a manager mindset.

Tony: I love that.

So makers, not managers.

Nikki: Makers, not managers.

Tony: I love that.

I’m just taking notes to make sure I get all these great points into the show notes.

What’s your number one tip to change the way we think about money in an AI-driven world?

Nikki: Financial advice has always been about building your financial life around assets, not just income.

Income can be disrupted. Assets compound.

What we’ve traditionally defined as assets have been financial assets, intellectual property, commodities, and so forth.

What I want to challenge everyone to think differently about in the AI era is this:

You are your greatest asset.

How you invest in yourself and who you become right now has almost limitless potential.

For the first time, we have access to a technology and a level of intelligence that is truly a superpower.

If you learn how to co-evolve with AI and become incredibly valuable and exponentially capable, that is what actually gives you the greatest earning potential, the greatest access to what the future holds, and a point of view on the world that other people might miss.

Rather than thinking only about other assets, recognize that you are actually the greatest asset right now.

Tony: That’s a wonderful place to close.

You are your best asset, and you’re the best at being who you are.

I’ve done a couple of shows about authenticity and being yourself that people who watch and listen may have heard.

Nikki, where can people learn more about you and Flipwork?

And most importantly, subscribe to your newsletter.

We haven’t talked about your newsletter, but I absolutely love it.

Nikki: Thank you. I’m so glad you enjoy my newsletter.

First of all, I’d love to connect on LinkedIn.

People can find me at NikkiBarua.com, which is my personal website.

You can sign up for my weekly newsletter, Reinvention Roadmap, where I provide really practical strategies for gaining relevance in the AI age.

I’d also invite people to take the free diagnostic at Flipwork.ai.

Check it out.

It’s going to be hugely valuable and a great place to start in your AI journey.

Tony: Awesome.

For everybody watching and listening, as always, there will be links to all these things so you can easily find them if you have access to the show notes.

Nikki, thanks for joining us on Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Nikki: Thank you so much for having me, Tony.

Tony: It’s been a pleasure and a great learning experience.

Thank you, everyone, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

If you learned something today that changed the way you think about AI and money, please be sure to subscribe and share it with a friend.

You can also go to my website at TonySteuer.com to join the Get Ready Movement and receive my newsletter.

Until next time, let’s change the way we think about money.