Back in 1995, I was a student at a community college in Minnesota that had just gotten a T1 line — not cable, a telephone line — bringing internet access onto campus. The wiring had already been done earlier that year before I ever started there, but I made a point of using every break I had to get into the computer labs and figure out what this “internet” thing, the WWW, actually was. At that point it was just Netscape and gray backgrounds — no online business, no commerce, nothing you’d recognize today.

That timing wasn’t an accident. April 1995 is when the internet was officially handed over from the old NSFNET backbone — the government-and-university research network — to commercial networks, the moment it stopped being a research project and started becoming the internet we know. By that fall, into early 1996, it was opening up for commercial business more and more, right as I was in those labs learning it from the ground floor.

Within a year, I was teaching internet classes in the continuing education department. Not long after, I built my first website — for my bank, The Bank of Elk River.

Over the next couple decades, I built over a hundred more for clients across the country. I’ve spent my career being the guy who shows up early to a new technology and then turns around and teaches everyone else how to use it.

When Did AI Actually Go Mainstream?

People assume AI’s public debut was ChatGPT in 2022 — but the truth is, AI has been quietly part of everyday life for decades, starting with things like ELIZA, a 1960s text-based “therapist” chatbot, and later voice assistants like Siri. Even so, most of that was narrow, scripted, or single-purpose.

The real turning point — the moment AI became something anyone could sit down and talk to — came on November 30, 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT to the public. It became the fastest-growing application in history, reaching 100 million active monthly users by the end of January 2023. Within days of launch, ChatGPT sent a shockwave through the tech industry, triggering a “code red” at Google and accelerating a multibillion-dollar Microsoft investment into OpenAI. Medium HISTORY

What followed was a rapid wave of competitors — Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok all launched to the public in the months and years after ChatGPT’s debut. Nearly three years later, ChatGPT alone was seeing roughly 800 million weekly users by November 2025. MediumMedium

So when you hear people say “AI is brand new” — it’s more accurate to say: AI has been building for 60+ years, but it became something ordinary people actually use in their daily lives starting in late 2022. That’s less than four years ago. If you feel behind, you’re not — almost everyone started at the same starting line you did.

Many people struggle to understand AI

Here’s the thing about AI right now: it’s moving faster than the internet ever did. I started using AI tools about two years ago — first Bard (now Gemini), then ChatGPT — just to help write copy and generate images for a business I was running. Since then, the pace has been relentless. New tools, new capabilities, new terminology, every few months.

And if you’re in your 40s, 50s, or beyond, I know how that feels. You don’t want to learn AI by scrolling through a hundred conflicting Facebook posts, and you don’t have time to sift through every “guru” channel promising the one trick that changes everything. You just want someone to hand you a clear path — the same way someone should have handed one to me back in 1995. But that’s okay. I like learning things hands-on and then sharing it with other people.

That struggle is real for two groups of people especially:

* People worried AI is coming for their job, who haven’t been given any training by their employer

* People who want to build something of their own — a home-based business — but don’t know where AI or online tools fit into that

This is why I pivoted

I stopped building websites for people in late 2022 after we moved to Tennessee. But by early to mid-2024 I was starting to learn to use AI tools to create blog posts for one of my personal websites. I could see that this was something that was going to explode and become at least as big as the Internet itself was in 1995.

That’s exactly why I built AI for Humans — a free Skool community and a growing library of training designed to humanize AI, not complicate it. It’s structured in modules, starting with the basics — how to show up, how to communicate — before moving into using tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini in practical, everyday ways.

If your employer hasn’t given you access to these tools or shown you how to use them for your job, you can start learning on your own time, for free, and protect your own future instead of waiting for someone else to hand it to you.

And if you’ve been curious about building something of your own — not chasing followers, not another program that fizzles out — I’m also part of a team using the Legacy Builders model, inside a digital education industry that’s projected to be worth trillions in the coming years. It’s a full community, tens of thousands of people strong, built on one simple rule: we don’t let each other give up.

Join me on this journey

I’ve spent thirty years watching technology waves come in — the internet, websites, social media, and now AI. Every time, the people who did best weren’t the ones who knew the most on day one. They were the ones who found someone to walk them through it, one step at a time.

[That’s one of my AI twins in this video.]

That’s what I’m here for. Come join me at the AI for Humans Skool community (it’s free), catch the weekly videos on the AI for Humans YouTube channel, and if you want the story from the very beginning — my journey from Netscape to ChatGPT — that article is already live here on Substack.

I’m just getting started. I’d love for you to be part of it.

NOTE: I used my AI assistant Claude to write this post. I’ve been working with Claude for several months so it knows my business. It knows what I wanted to write about. I basically just gave it the transcript of the video at the top of the page and a couple points to bring out and it wrote this for me. One of the things that I’ve taught it is to make my writing not look AI by removing certain phrases and also those em dashes… — like that. This time I allowed those em dashes to stay and not have them cleaned out because I wanted you to know the power of AI.

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