Most founders think they're tier 1. They're tier 2 at best.

In Darwin we use a tier system to self-assess how each person on the team uses AI. Three levels — we don’t even count the people who don’t use it.

                    ╱╲
                   ╱ 1╲          "what should I do?"
                  ╱────╲          AI proposes; you ride
                 ╱      ╲
                ╱   2    ╲        "do this task"
               ╱──────────╲        AI executes; you direct
              ╱            ╲
             ╱     3        ╲     "translate this email"
            ╱────────────────╲     AI as a fancier Google

         most people  ─→ tier 3
         your team    ─→ tier 2 (minimum)
         your edge    ─→ tier 1 (rare)

Tier 3 is using AI like Google. Drafting an email. Looking up a recipe. Translating a paragraph. Most of these things could already be done with pre-GPT software, so you’re not really getting anything new. If someone says “yeah, I use AI all day to write emails,” that’s tier 3.

Tier 2 is using AI to do tasks. Not just drafting an email — running every email through Claude for triage. Not just writing a marketing brief — having AI do deep research first, build the landing page code, and check the copy. Compressing steps that used to take hours. Most people on a serious team should be at least tier 2.

Tier 1 is the hard one. Tier 1 means asking AI to propose things you wouldn’t have thought of yourself. Not “help me build this fundraising deck” but “should I be raising at all? Look at our metrics, look at my situation, tell me what to do.” Not “write copy for this campaign” but “given everything we know about our customer, what campaign should we run?”

The scary thing about tier 1 is that today’s models still hallucinate. You can be wrong. But as the models keep improving, tier 1 will start to dominate tier 2 and tier 3 — because tier 1 doesn’t cap the AI at the human’s prior judgment.

We don’t know yet whether you want a whole team of tier 1 people or a mix. Probably a mix. But you want zero tier 3 and zero non-users. That’s a baseline.

Self-assess honestly. The trap is that tier 3 people often think they’re tier 1, because they’ve used ChatGPT a lot. The number of hours doesn’t matter. What matters is the kind of question you’re asking it.

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