AI Is the New King—and the People Who Know How to Command It Are the New Royal Family

 

AI is creating a new aristocracy—and if you cannot use it, you may soon be serving those who can. In plain terms, AI has seized the throne. Learn to command it now, or spend the next decade working for people who did.

The coronation happened on November 30, 2022.

There was no cathedral. No golden carriage. No crown. No trumpet. No priest shouting, “Long live the King!”

There was just a computer screen.

On that day, OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public as a research preview. It looked almost harmless: a little box waiting for somebody to type something into it. Ask a question. Get an answer. Ask another. Get another. Cute.

I think history will remember it differently. November 30, 2022, was the day the throne changed hands. Since 2022, AI has become the New King. And those who know how to use it have become the new noblemen and members of the royal family.

That sounds dramatic.

Good.

History is dramatic.

The steam engine was dramatic. Electricity was dramatic. The automobile was dramatic. The computer was dramatic. The Internet was dramatic. Every major technology eventually divides society into two camps: people who learn how to use the new machine and people who continue behaving as though the old world still exists.

We have seen this movie before.

When industrial machinery spread during the Industrial Revolution, muscle gradually lost some of its economic power to machines. A worker could swing a hammer harder. The machine did not care. It could swing harder, longer, faster, and without asking for lunch.

Then computers arrived.

Suddenly, knowing how to calculate everything by hand was no longer enough. Knowing how to command the machine became more valuable. The spreadsheet did not destroy arithmetic. It changed who could perform complicated arithmetic quickly.

The Internet pulled the same stunt.

A business with a website could reach customers across continents. A researcher with Internet access could search information that once required hours inside a library. The old gatekeepers began losing their keys.

Now AI has entered the palace. And this fellow is greedy.

It wants writing.

It wants programming.

It wants research.

It wants marketing.

It wants customer service.

It wants data analysis.

It wants images.

It wants video.

It wants accounting.

It wants medicine.

It wants law.

It wants education.

It even wants pieces of management.

“Excuse me, Your Majesty. Is there anything you do not want?”

Silence.

That is the scary part.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT on November 30, 2022, as a conversational system capable of answering follow-up questions, acknowledging mistakes, challenging incorrect assumptions, and following detailed instructions. What followed was not merely another Silicon Valley product cycle. It was the opening of the palace gates.

The numbers tell the story without perfume.

Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index reports that generative AI reached 53% adoption within just 3 years, faster than either the personal computer or the Internet. It also reports that 88% of surveyed organizations were using AI in 2025 and 70% were using generative AI in at least one business function. Global corporate AI investment more than doubled in 2025, while generative-AI investment grew by more than 200%.

Read those numbers again.

This is not a toy waiting to discover whether it has a market. The market has arrived. McKinsey found the same stampede. In its 2025 global survey of 1,993 participants across 105 countries, 88% said their organizations regularly used AI in at least one business function, up from 78% the previous year. Even more revealing, 62% said their organizations were already experimenting with or scaling AI agents.

So when somebody tells me, “AI is just hype,” I want to pull up a chair.

“Please continue.”

I enjoy comedy.

The real question is no longer whether AI will enter the workplace. The fellow is already sitting at the desk. The real question is who will learn to command it. That is where my royal-family argument begins.

The new aristocracy will not necessarily be the people who own castles, inherit titles, or wear expensive suits. Increasingly, it will include ordinary people who understand how to turn AI into economic leverage.

A person who once needed 5 hours to research, organize, analyze, draft, edit, and format something may increasingly accomplish portions of that work in a fraction of the time. A small business owner can use AI to draft advertisements, analyze customer feedback, prepare marketing ideas, summarize documents, brainstorm products, and automate routine communication. A programmer can use it to help debug code. A professor can use it to develop instructional materials. A financial analyst can use it to explore scenarios and organize research, provided the human verifies the work.

One person walks into the office carrying only his brain.

Another walks in carrying his brain plus an artificial army.

Tell me again that these two workers are competing on equal terms.

They are not.

Research gives this argument teeth. An NBER study by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey R. Raymond examined 5,179 customer-support agents. Access to a generative-AI assistant increased productivity by about 14% on average. Among novice and lower-skilled workers, the improvement reached 34%.

That number should make managers sit upright.

AI was not merely helping experts become slightly faster. It was allowing less-experienced workers to absorb patterns associated with better workers.

That is almost medieval in reverse.

For centuries, knowledge was guarded. Masters knew things apprentices did not. Professionals accumulated techniques through years of experience. Institutions controlled access to books, professors, laboratories, databases, and specialists.

AI walks into that arrangement carrying bolt cutters.

“Where is the gate?”

“What gate?”

Exactly.

Another NBER study of 7,137 knowledge workers across 66 firms found that among workers given access to a generative-AI tool, the 80% who used it spent about 2 fewer hours per week on email during the latter half of the 6-month experiment and also reduced work outside regular hours.

Time is money.

But time is something nastier than money.

Money lost can sometimes be earned again. Yesterday cannot.

That is why I call skilled AI users the new noblemen. Their privilege is leverage.

And the labor market is beginning to price that privilege.

PwC’s 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer found that jobs requiring AI skills carried an average wage premium of 56% in 2024. The premium varied sharply by industry: 123% in wholesale and retail trade, 103% in energy, 95% in information and communication, 65% in manufacturing, 64% in professional services, and 60% in financial services.

There is my crown.

It is sitting inside the paycheck.

Of course, AI will not make everybody rich. Owning Microsoft Excel never made everybody an accountant. Having Google never made everybody a scholar. Owning a camera never made everybody Steven Spielberg.

Access is not mastery.

That distinction matters.

Millions of people can open an AI chatbot and type, “Write something about business.”

Wonderful.

Millions of people can also buy a piano.

The concert hall remains strangely empty.

The valuable skill is learning how to interrogate AI, structure problems, provide context, test assumptions, verify outputs, combine tools, recognize hallucinations, refine prompts, protect confidential information, and convert machine output into useful human decisions.

That is where the crown sits.

The future may therefore contain a cruel irony. AI was supposed to democratize knowledge. It probably will. But democratizing a powerful tool does not guarantee equal outcomes.

Give two people the same hammer.

One builds a house.

The other breaks his thumb.

The IMF estimates that almost 40% of global employment is exposed to AI. In advanced economies, the figure rises to about 60%. Some workers will benefit because AI complements their abilities. Others may face lower labor demand, weaker wages, or outright replacement as machines perform portions of their jobs.

That is the uncomfortable part of the coronation.

Every king collects taxes.

AI's tax may be paid by workers who refuse to adapt.

I am not predicting that humans will become useless. That is Hollywood nonsense. Humans still provide judgment, accountability, trust, relationships, physical action, ethical responsibility, context, taste, leadership, and the ability to recognize when the machine is confidently talking rubbish.

But the competition is changing.

Increasingly, the contest will not be human versus AI.

It will be human versus human-with-AI.

That fight is ugly.

Imagine two equally talented consultants. One refuses AI because he considers using it intellectually impure. The other uses AI to organize research, interrogate datasets, generate competing hypotheses, summarize documents, rehearse objections, and draft alternative presentations before applying his own judgment.

They both have 8 hours.

One effectively brings one  worker to the battlefield.

The other brings a small platoon.

Who do I bet on?

Please.

I was born at night, but not last night.

And the transformation is accelerating. McKinsey reported that 71% of surveyed organizations were regularly using generative AI in at least 1 business function in its 2024 survey data, with especially heavy use in marketing and sales, product and service development, service operations, software engineering, and IT. By 2025, overall organizational AI use had reached 88%.

The palace is getting crowded.

There is another uncomfortable class issue hiding underneath all this.

An NBER study of U.S. adoption found that by late 2024, nearly 40% of Americans ages 18–64 were using generative AI. About 23% of employed respondents had used it for work during the previous week, while 9% were using it every working day. Yet adoption was not evenly distributed. NBER reported workplace adoption of about 40% among workers with bachelor's degrees or higher compared with about 20% among workers without college degrees. Usage reached 49.6% in computer and mathematical occupations and 49% in management occupations.

There it is.

A new digital class system is quietly forming.

Not simply rich versus poor.

Not simply educated versus uneducated.

Increasingly, AI-fluent versus AI-illiterate.

That division may become vicious because AI does not merely give people information. Properly used, it gives them leverage over information.

That is different.

Information tells me what bricks are.

Leverage helps me build the wall.

And this is why I reject the comforting little sentence people love repeating: “AI will never replace humans.”

Perhaps.

But that sentence is incomplete.

AI does not have to replace humanity to wreck somebody's career.

A calculator did not replace mathematicians. It replaced the commercial value of paying somebody merely to perform basic arithmetic slowly.

Word processors did not replace writers. They demolished entire layers of manual typing and document production.

Digital photography did not abolish photographers. It gutted businesses built around film processing.

Google did not eliminate researchers. It made certain forms of information retrieval almost laughably cheap.

Technology rarely announces, “I have come to destroy your profession.”

It whispers something more dangerous:

“I can make part of your profession cheaper.”

Then another part.

Then another.

That is how kingdoms fall.

So, yes, I call AI the New King. Not because I worship machines. Kings should never be worshipped merely because they sit on thrones. I call it King because power has shifted toward it. Capital is flooding toward it. Companies are adopting it. Workers are learning it. Universities are confronting it. Governments are regulating it. Investors are financing it. Employers are paying premiums for its skills. Stanford reports that private investment in generative AI grew more than 200% in 2025, while newly funded AI companies increased 71%.

Money has an excellent nose.

It smells power before speeches do.

But I would add one final warning.

The new nobleman is not the person who merely uses AI.

It is the person who knows what he is doing with it.

Blind dependence on AI is not sophistication. It is intellectual drunkenness. AI can hallucinate facts, misunderstand context, reproduce errors, generate mediocre sludge, and produce confident answers that collapse under inspection. The human who stops thinking because AI can think with him has not joined the royal family.

He has become the court fool.

The crown belongs to the person who combines human judgment with machine speed.

That person asks better questions.

Checks the answers.

Challenges the machine.

Uses multiple sources.

Knows when to accept the output.

Knows when to throw it into the garbage.

And, most importantly, knows how to turn the machine's capabilities into measurable value.

That is the new aristocracy I see emerging.

The old nobleman inherited land.

The industrial nobleman owned factories.

The 20th-century nobleman controlled capital.

The Internet nobleman controlled networks and information.

The AI nobleman commands intelligence on demand.

Welcome to the new kingdom.

The King is already on the throne.

The palace gates are open.

And the brutal question facing every worker, entrepreneur, professor, student, professional, and business owner is no longer whether AI deserves the crown. History has already moved past that argument. The question is much simpler: Do I learn how to command the King—or spend the next decade bowing to the people who did?

 

On a different but equally important note, readers who enjoy thoughtful analysis may also find the titles in my  “Brief Book Series” worth exploring. You can also read them here on Google Play, or in Barnes & Noble bookstore: Brief Book Series.