I used to think I was a pretty advanced AI user. I had my favorite prompts saved, I used ChatGPT every day, and I felt ahead of the curve. Then I came across a post from a LinkedIn creator who works with founders, and it made me take an honest look at how I actually use it.
The author’s main point is blunt: most founders are stuck on level two of AI. They ask it questions. They write a decent prompt. Then they stop and call it a day. That’s the beginner tier, and almost everyone is already doing it.
The author is also open about their own blind spot. Before, they thought they understood technology. Then they realised they were stuck at level three themselves: ask, prompt, create. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s nowhere near the ceiling. They’d built businesses on far less, yet they were losing hours every single week. Once they saw the full ladder laid out, they felt a bit embarrassed at how low they’d been aiming.
That hit me, because I recognized myself in it. According to the post’s author, there are 11 levels between asking ChatGPT a question and having it run parts of your business for you. Most founders never make it past level three. The ones who do are quietly pulling ahead right now.
Here’s the full ladder, from beginner to power user, with my notes on each step.
🟢 Beginner: Where Almost Everyone Lives
- Ask it questions. Use it to explain concepts, brainstorm and solve everyday problems. This is the entry point, like asking a smart friend about a confusing contract clause or ideas for a team offsite.
- Prompt it properly. Give it context, tone, format and a clear goal. Try “Write a 150-word follow-up email to a client who missed our call, friendly but firm, with two time slots” instead of “write an email.” The difference in output is huge.
- Create and improve your first drafts. Let it shape your emails, ideas and early documents. You stop starting from a blank page and start editing instead.
Most people stop here. The next tier is where the real time savings begin.
🟡 Intermediate: Giving AI Eyes and a Brain
- Search the live web. Pull current news, competitor moves and real numbers instead of relying on stale training data. It’s handy for checking what a rival launched last week or for current pricing benchmarks.
- Upload screenshots, spreadsheets and files. Let it read your material directly. Drop in a messy sales export and ask which product line is slipping. That’s analyst work done in seconds.
- Use deep reasoning for the harder stuff. Switch to reasoning modes for coding, strategy and planning. These models take their time and work through a problem step by step, which helps a lot with pricing decisions or tricky hiring plans.
- Learn with study mode. Use practice sets and real tutoring to pick up new skills. If you need to understand unit economics or SQL fast, this turns AI into a patient private teacher.
Once you’re comfortable here, AI stops being a chatbot and becomes a real assistant. The advanced tier is where it starts to feel like part of your team.
🟠 Advanced: Making AI Know Your Business
- Run deep research. Have it work across dozens of sources and come back with a proper cited report. Market sizing, vendor comparisons and industry scans that used to take a week can now land in your inbox while you’re in a meeting.
- Personalize it with memory and project context. Feed it your offer, your audience, your tone and your past decisions so it actually knows your business. Then you don’t have to re-explain everything in every chat.
- Connect it to your tools and automate repeat work. Hook it into your email, calendar, docs or CRM and hand off the tasks you used to do by hand every week, like weekly reports, inbox triage and meeting summaries.
🔴 Power User: The Top of the Ladder
- Delegate entire workflows. Let it browse, research and act while you’re doing something else entirely. You aren’t prompting step by step anymore. You hand over the outcome and check the result later.
Seeing all 11 levels side by side is what makes this post so useful. Most of us know these features exist somewhere, but we never connect them into a path we can follow.
Why People Stall at Level Three
This was the line that stuck with me most:
The gap between level three and level eleven isn’t skill. It’s exposure.
The creator explains that nobody teaches you this ladder exists, so most people stop climbing early. They’ve watched founders who discover it early pull ahead fast, sometimes within weeks.
Meanwhile, the ones stuck on level three keep doing the same work by hand, just a little slower each week. A few extra hours here and there doesn’t feel like much until you add up a whole year of it. I think that’s the scariest part, because you don’t notice the loss while it’s happening.
How to Climb Without Getting Overwhelmed
The author’s advice is refreshingly simple: pick one level above where you’re at right now and actually use it this week, not someday. They also say it would save you the year they lost figuring this out the hard way on their own.
Here’s how I’d put that into practice:
- Find your honest level. Look at what you did with AI in the last seven days, not what you’ve tried once.
- Pick one task for the next rung. At level three? Upload one real spreadsheet this week. At level six? Run one deep research report on a question you’ve been putting off.
- Repeat it until it’s boring. A level only counts once it’s part of your weekly routine.
- Then move up again. Small, steady steps beat a weekend binge of tutorials you’ll forget by Monday.
What I love about this framework is that it removes the guesswork. You don’t need to master everything at once. You just need to know what the next step is.
The original post ends with a question worth answering honestly: where do you actually sit on this ladder right now? Check out the full LinkedIn post to see the ladder in the author’s own words and join the conversation. If you know a founder who’s still just asking basic questions and calling it a day, send it their way.