You're Not Tired of AI. You're Scared of It.
I gave a keynote at a prestigious professional services firm last week in Washington, DC. They’re one of the largest employers in the world, so I was excited to share some of my research with the audience of senior partners and CXOs from their global client base. Right before I went on, my host pulled me aside.
"I've been hearing a lot about AI fatigue," he said. "People are kind of tired of it."
I decided to test that, and improvised right off the bat.
“Raise your hand if you're feeling ‘AI fatigue,’” I asked the room.
All hands in the room shot up.
“Now, keep your hand up if you're prepared to show us radical use cases you've discovered with AI.”
All the hands went down. (Attentive readers of my blog will recognize this as a variant of the “Baseball or Hand Grenade” question I’ve mentioned before.)
I let that sit for a second. (The room got quiet—the good kind of quiet.) “That's kind of ironic, right? We're all exhausted from talking about AI... but none of us are actually doing anything with it.”
The Email That Explained Everything
A few weeks earlier, I'd gotten an email that cracked this whole thing open for me.
I offer a 17-day “Personal AI Bootcamp” through my website. Like any good email marketer, when someone doesn't enroll, I send a quick survey: Why didn't you sign up? The options are simple—timing, price, not interested, unclear what you'd get. Just click one.
A Stanford professor friend of mine didn't click any of them. He replied directly to the email instead.
His response: “Dear Jeremy, ‘fear of learning something new that I should [expletive] already know’ wasn't one of the choices.”
Actual screen shot… name omitted to respect anonymity
I read it twice.
Then I started laughing. Because he'd just named the thing nobody wants to admit.
The Reframe
Here's what I think is actually happening:
What folks are calling “AI fatigue” isn't fatigue at all. It's insecurity.
People aren't tired of hearing about AI. They're tired of not doing anything about it while everyone else talks about it. Every LinkedIn post, every keynote, every breathless article about how AI is changing everything—it's not exhausting because there's too much information. It's exhausting because each one is another reminder that they still haven't started.
The fatigue isn't from overexposure. It's from mounting pressure.
(Think about it: Have you ever felt “fatigued” by something you're actually good at? Something you're winning at?)
The people I know who are genuinely equipped with AI skills? They're not fatigued. They're exhilarated. They can't shut up about the new thing they tried, the workflow they transformed, the problem they solved in ten minutes that used to take ten hours. They're practically vibrating with possibility.
The exhaustion and the exhilaration are inversely correlated.
What's Really Going On
My Stanford professor friend nailed it: Fear of learning something new that I should already know.
That's not fatigue. That's fear of exposure. Fear that if you actually tried to use AI in front of anyone, they'd discover you don't know what you're doing. Fear that you're already behind—and falling further behind every day you don't start.
All that AI talk isn't making people tired. It's making them anxious. And “I'm fatigued” is a much more acceptable thing to say than “I'm scared.”
The Way Out
The good news? Fear is the first stage, not the final one.
I think about it as a progression: Fear → Familiar → Fluent → Fun. Everyone starts at Fear. (Even the people who seem like experts—trust me, we all started terrified.) The goal isn't to skip Fear. It's to move through it.
And you move through it the same way you move through any fear: by doing the thing. Not by reading more about the thing. Not by attending another webinar about the thing. By actually opening ChatGPT and trying something. Anything.
Here's what might actually help: you're supposed to be bad at it. That's not failure—that's the process. You don't learn to ride a bike without scraping your knees, and you don't get fluent with AI without a few faceplants along the way.
The irony is that the thing everyone's afraid of—looking stupid while learning—is the only path to the thing everyone wants: confidence.
An Honest Question
Next time you catch yourself saying “I'm so tired of hearing about AI,” ask yourself: Am I actually tired? Or am I just scared?
Because if you're fatigued, the prescription is rest.
But if you're scared, rest won't help. The only cure for AI insecurity is AI fluency.
And you don't get fluent by waiting until you're ready.
Related: Malpractice
Related: Scrape Your Knees
Related: Embrace AI Despite Uncertainty
Related: Admit You Don’t Know
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