The Skill Everyone Should Learn Is Also A Product Now

Mark Cuban has a message for young people: learn to work with AI, learn it now, treat it like literacy, treat it like the thing that separates the people who get hired from the people who don't.

This is good advice. It is also, almost simultaneously, a business.

Jared Kushner launched a startup this week — this actual week, September 10, 2025 — that helps businesses figure out how to use AI. That's the product. The gap between "AI exists" and "we are using AI" is apparently large enough to build a company in, which I believe, because I have seen the inside of most companies.

The two stories ran back to back, essentially. One billionaire explaining that the crucial skill is knowing how to talk to the machine, and another billionaire selling that knowledge to organizations that won't learn it themselves. You could call this a contradiction. I'd call it a complete picture.

There is something perfectly calibrated about this moment — the advice and the arbitrage existing in the same news cycle, each one making the other more true. The more Cuban tells people they need to learn this, the more valuable it becomes to not have learned it. Kushner is not selling AI. He's selling the version of AI competence that fits into a procurement process and comes with a slide deck and a signed contract and someone to blame if it doesn't work.

Companies are not people. Companies do not "learn skills." Companies hire vendors. This is not a critique; it's just what companies are. And so the advice — learn this, it's crucial, it will define you — is aimed at an individual and ignored by the organization, and then the organization writes a check to someone who learned it.

Cuban isn't wrong. Kushner isn't wrong either, which is the part that sits badly.

The move is to be the person who learned it before the consulting firm arrived. Or to be the consulting firm. Those are the two positions. Everything else is just waiting to be told what to do by one or the other.