Opinion
Stop building AI apps on the weekend. Start becoming an AI conductor in your field.
Everyone now needs to be a manager. Not of people, but of AI. And the space between those who've internalized that shift and those who haven't will be the defining career gap of the next five years.
There’s a new weekend agenda for the TLV high-tech young and restless: beach, matkot, build your AI app.
And I've heard of them all… the Spotify playlist that matches your blood type, the app that auto-replies to your mother-in-law's WhatsApps, the personalized horoscopes generator for your dog.
It's a wonderful entry point into AI fluency and gives a real handle on how easy it is to build. And who knows, maybe one in a million will make a buck or a million. But for most, it becomes a dopamine-hit distraction from the less sexy, far more strategic move.
Because what will truly set you up for our AI era is not becoming a vibe coder. It's becoming an AI conductor in your actual field.
I’m not talking about just being more efficient and effective with AI. Those who go further are the ones who stop using AI and start conducting it, structuring workflows around it.
The shift is already happening across every field. Writers are becoming content architects, analysts are becoming insight curators, recruiters are designing intelligent hiring workflows instead of screening CVs, marketers are conducting campaigns instead of creating them.
Everyone now needs to be a manager. Not of people, but of AI. And the space between those who've internalized that shift and those who haven't will be the defining career gap of the next five years.
The data already reflects this. A November 2025 survey by the Israel Innovation Authority found that 95% of Israeli tech workers use AI tools regularly, 20 points above the global average. But only 11% of Israeli employers offer structured AI training, meaning most people are using the tools without ever being taught how to use them.
Layer on the local pressure, and this becomes all the more urgent.
Tomer Diari, Partner at Aleph, recently put his finger on something few have said aloud in a LinkedIn post: the strong shekel is a stealth tax on everyone in Israeli hi-tech. Israeli companies earn in dollars. We live in shekels. With the shekel up roughly 20% year-over-year, your employer's cost of keeping you, relative to that of an engineer in Warsaw or Bangalore, has ballooned.
Diari's read: some companies will stomach it, some will have awkward salary conversations, and many are already hiring overseas. Add to that the structural layoffs hitting Israeli tech, ~1,800 roles cut in December 2025 alone, with analysts calling it structural, not cyclical.
The shekel pressure and the AI pressure compound in a way that makes the move to conductor an urgent one.
So what does this actually look like in practice?
I think it starts by looking at your actual work, the 8-10 hours a day you spend on it every day, and asking: what would this look like if I were the director of a small AI team, rather than the person executing the tasks?
If you're a product marketer, you're not writing positioning docs anymore. You're building a research-to-brief-to-distribution pipeline where your judgment shapes every key decision.
If you're an investor, you're not having someone summarize decks. You're running a proprietary deal-sourcing and pattern-recognition system.
The common thread is that your domain expertise becomes the conductor's baton.
I’m not anti-tinkering (best believe I have my own weird and wonderful apps cooking). Just don't mistake that for the only AI investment you need to be making.
The professionals who come out of this not just intact but elevated won't be the ones with the coolest weekend project. They’ll be the ones who rewired how they work, became fluent in directing AI inside their specific domain, and made themselves indispensable in the process.
