History is absolutely littered with people who were certain a new technology would end everything.

The printing press (1400s) — clergy feared it would spread heresy and destroy moral order. Railways (1800s) — doctors warned that speeds over 30mph would cause madness and asphyxiation. Electricity — gas companies said it would cause mass unemployment and explosion risks. Telephones — predicted to destroy face-to-face society and enable criminals. Radio, television, email, eCommerce, ATMs, calculators in schools…every single time, someone with a very serious face looked at the world and said, “This is it. This is the one that breaks us.”

None of it landed the way the doomsayers predicted.

And yet…here we are again.

The Dinner Party That Gave Me Déjà Vu

My wife and I are lucky enough to live in Playa Del Carmen. We have a condo we love, and because of that, we love hosting. Dinners, gatherings, late nights with good people, great food, better conversation. Most of our friends and guests are entrepreneurs. We genuinely love those nights.

A few weeks ago, we had a guest over who spent the majority of the evening talking about Claude Code. Which, fine.. it is genuinely impressive stuff. But somewhere around the second hour, it became clear that this wasn’t excitement. This was obsession. He openly admitted that outside of sleep and the gym, basically everything he was doing was “talking to Claude.” He wasn’t spending time with his family. He wasn’t connecting with friends. And ironically, with all the hours he was pouring into it, most of it didn’t sound like it was actually moving his business forward. It was just…compulsive consumption of a new shiny thing.

Then came the apocalyptic part. He was convinced that entrepreneurship as we know it is finished. That anyone with a job should be afraid. It was honestly a little sad to watch someone so clearly brilliant spiral into a very dark read of something that I think is, genuinely, one of the most exciting things to happen in our lifetime.

A few weeks later, same energy on a Mastermind call. New group, first session and within minutes, one of the guys was telling me and another woman who runs an outsourcing agency that we should basically prepare to shut down or completely pivot our businesses. He knew nothing about either of our companies. He hadn’t asked. He didn’t seem to want to. He just wanted to deliver the bad news.

I’ve seen this more times than I can count lately.

I Get It. I Really Do.

Change is uncomfortable. It’s always been uncomfortable. There’s even some psychology behind it..our brains are wired to register uncertainty as threat. During the p*ndemic, people bought enough toilet paper to last a geological era, not because they were stupid but because the brain under stress doesn’t always do its best thinking.

So I get the fear response. I’m not judging it. But I’m also not going to pretend it’s an accurate map of where we’re actually headed.

Because here’s what I’m seeing from where I sit, and I run three businesses, so I have a decent view.

What’s Actually Happening

At GetCSM, we place Customer Success Managers from LATAM and the Philippines with companies across the US. Two years ago, roughly 40% of our clients were asking for CSMs with strong AI and automation skills. Today? That number is closer to 80%.

Think about what that shift actually means. It’s not that AI replaced Customer Success Managers. It’s that the bar for what makes a great CSM just got raised and the ones who leaned into AI are now more valuable, more strategic, and more indispensable than ever. The reactive, ticket-managing, QBR-reading version of the role? Yeah, that’s fading. But the strategic, deeply human, proactive version? That’s just getting started.

The demand got so real, so fast, that we didn’t just start hiring when a role opened. We hired a recruiter whose only job is to find and develop exceptional talent before we need them. We’re farming, not hunting. We find great people at conferences, at workshops, through the networks of people who are investing in their own growth. By the time a client needs someone, we’ve already been building a relationship with the right person for months. That’s not a response to AI killing jobs..that’s AI-era demand raising the stakes for the best talent.

The Real Story: More Possible Than Ever

Here’s what the doom crowd keeps missing.

The combination of AI tools & global outsourcing has fundamentally changed what’s possible for entrepreneurs. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this: you can very literally run three or four businesses today with the same time and energy it took to run one business two years ago.

I’m living proof. My wife and I run multiple companies between us. We work from Playa Del Carmen. We host those dinner parties. We do this podcast. We have a life. Two years ago, that kind of operational leverage required either a massive team, a massive budget, or you were simply grinding yourself into the floor.

Now? With the right AI stack and the right remote team — operations managers, project managers, executive assistants, marketing specialists, CSMs — all working from around the world, at a fraction of the cost of a traditional US-based hire — the math has completely changed.

The question is no longer “can I afford to build this?” The question is “how many things can I now build that I couldn’t before?”

That is not a threat. That is a gift.

The Kool-Aid Was Drunk Too Fast

Look, I’m not here to say AI changes nothing. It changes everything. Industries will shift. Some roles will disappear. New roles  we don’t have names for yet  will emerge. That has always been true of every major technological leap in human history, and there is zero reason to believe this time is different.

But the people currently treating this moment like the apocalypse have, in my opinion, drunk the Kool-Aid too fast. They saw the capability, felt the vertigo, and immediately jumped to worst-case.

The more interesting question isn’t “what does AI take away?” It’s “what does AI make possible that genuinely wasn’t before?”

And if your answer to that question is to spend 14 hours a day talking to a chatbot instead of your family, or to spend the first call with a new Mastermind group delivering bad news to people whose businesses you know nothing about — you’ve missed the point entirely.

The Future Isn’t Something to Survive. It’s Something to Build In.

Remote work already proved the skeptics wrong. People said you couldn’t build culture without an office. That trust required proximity. That teams would fall apart without a physical space to gather in. That companies would suffer.

And then millions of entrepreneurs built incredible companies with fully remote teams, from every corner of the world, at every hour of the day — and realized that the old way wasn’t sacred. It was just familiar.

AI is the same moment, again, with higher stakes and faster velocity.

The entrepreneurs who will win the next decade aren’t the ones panicking. They’re the ones asking better questions. They’re building leaner, smarter, further-reaching companies than anyone thought possible. They’re hiring remarkable people from LATAM and the Philippines and Eastern Europe and wherever else the talent is, equipping them with the best tools, and competing with companies ten times their size.

They’re living where they want to live.

They’re building what they want to build.

And they’re genuinely excited about what comes next.

You should be too.

Alexander Booth is the co-founder of Rich & Remote, owner of GetCSM and Huckleberry Consulting, and a relentless advocate for building businesses that don’t require you to sacrifice your life in the process.