The AI Paradox.Love it, hate it, it’s here.
Three people spend three days in a shed on Cape Cod, asking what AI does to small business owners, to the people they employ, and to the graduates who cannot find work.
So who keeps their job?
Three days. One shed. One question.
Gus Waite lost a twenty-year career when private equity cut costs. Gary Kadi sold his company and walked away from work. Taran Agarwal is young enough to have started in AI the moment ChatGPT came out. Gus put the three of them in a shed on Cape Cod for three days, with no agenda, to see what they could build.
Gus asks Gary a question that stops him in his tracks: what do you love to do?
The numbers work. That is the problem.
Gary draws the company he would have built ten years ago, role by role. The payroll comes to $700,000. Taran redraws it with agents doing the repetitive work and lands near $300,000.
Then comes the question: how would you feel if you had to fire twelve of your employees? The answer on camera is “I couldn’t do it.” The rest of the film looks for an answer that does not start with a layoff.
The people on camera.
- Gary Kadi
- Built a company, sold it, and stepped away from work. He calls himself a strategic architect and integrator for small businesses.
- Gus Waite
- Twenty years in real estate as a managing broker, laid off after private equity cut costs. He rebuilt his working life around AI on Cape Cod.
- Taran Agarwal
- Studied at New York University and started building with AI the moment ChatGPT came out. He automates the work owners hate doing.
- Mariya Di Luzio
- Left accounting and financial analysis after eight years, then worked in jewelry and ran her own vegan dessert company, doing its marketing herself. Getting sick showed her how hard it is for functional medicine to be found. When AI arrived, it became the way to help that field grow.
- Two graduates
- One in Berlin with a master’s degree, facing a job market that is harder to enter. One with a master’s in data science, working at a fried chicken counter.
“Somebody asked me one time, what did it cost me? And it was everything.”
“I got a very clear intuition that I should just stop, sit still, get quiet, and allow things to unfold.”
“Any pain point in your business that you hate doing, that is manual and repetitive, we automate that.”
“A bachelor or even a master diploma is not the entry ticket anymore. You have to do so much more than that.”
How the film ends.
Read the closing two minutes
37:00The important thing is to start with: what do I love? What don’t I? What do I really hate? What task am I doing right now that just bugs me? And find out if there’s a solution for that one task.
37:25If you’re aware of AI and you can anticipate it, you can make new choices ahead of it.
37:30That’s why we’re filming this film. The main thing I want them to get is: you are not alone. If you’re scared, if you’re confused, if you’re overwhelmed, if you feel ashamed, if you don’t know what the next step is, if you feel hopeless, what I want to say is we are here to support you in doing what you love to do.
You are not alone.
That is the last thing the film says, and the reason it was made.