Dan Martell: 99% of People Are Stuck at Level 1 AI — Here's How to Jump Up

Dan Martell put out a video with a spicy claim in the title: 99% of people have no idea what's about to happen with AI. Clickbait? Maybe. Accurate? Honestly — after watching it, I think he's not wrong.

The gap between the people who understand where AI is actually going and the people who think "I tried Claude once" counts as being ahead is getting wider every single week. Dan maps three levels of AI usage, and almost nobody is past level one.

Dan's Three Levels of AI

In Dan Martell's latest video, he breaks down the stratification that's quietly happening right now:

Level 1 — The Assistants. This is where most people live. You've switched from ChatGPT to Claude, maybe you try Gemini, you ask it to write emails, brainstorm, summarize PDFs. It's a smart assistant sitting next to you. Useful — absolutely. But you're still doing all the work. You're just doing it slightly faster.

Dan's recommended Level 1 stack: WhisperFlow for voice input, Claude Co-work for automating your computer, Manifold for end-to-end workflows, Claude Code for custom solutions, and something he calls OpenClaude / Apex as a wrapper. If that list reads like a foreign language to you, that's the point — 99% of people don't even know these tools exist yet.

Level 2 — The Agent Operators. This is where it gets interesting. Instead of prompting AI to do one thing, you hand it a goal, it plans the steps, executes them, shares results, gets feedback, updates itself. You're not the worker anymore — you're the project manager of a team of AI agents.

Dan drops a stat that stopped me cold: ChatGPT has almost 6 billion visits a month. Manifold — one of the most popular agentic AI tools in the world — gets 18 million. That's 0.3% of ChatGPT's audience. Level 2 is nearly empty. Which means the opportunity right now is massive, and the people who move up from Level 1 to Level 2 in the next 6 months are going to have a stupid advantage.

Level 3 — The Frontier. This is where the next wave of billionaires are being made, according to Dan. Agents that spawn agents. Workflows that rewrite themselves. Companies being run largely by AI with humans at the top of the decision tree. Science-fiction adjacent — except it's not fiction anymore, it's just early.

Where I'd Push Back (And Where I Completely Agree)

Here's the part where I get honest. I run my business day-to-day. I build funnels, coach clients, run lives. And when I first heard someone describe "AI agents that do everything for you," my reaction was skepticism. Most of the people telling me to use AI couldn't even explain which tool to pick, let alone how to train it on my voice.

So I did what Dan is describing at Level 1. I took a book I'd written in my own voice, fed it into a bot, and trained an assistant that actually sounds like me. Suddenly the AI wasn't generic anymore — it was mine. I gave her a name. She writes in my tone. She references my frameworks. And that was just Level 1.

What Dan is saying — and this is where I 100% agree — is that the jump from Level 1 to Level 2 is where small business owners stop being busy and start being leveraged. The next step after training a good chatbot is automation. How do you get this to run without you always telling it to run? Zaps, triggers, agents that recognize events and respond. That's where the time gets given back to you.

And almost nobody I coach is there yet. They're still at Level 1. They think they're ahead because they use Claude instead of ChatGPT. They're not ahead. They're at the starting line while a small group of operators is already sprinting.

The Practical Move This Month

If you want to close the gap Dan is talking about, here's what I'd actually do — not in theory, in practice:

1. Pick one workflow you do every week that you hate. Not everything at once. One thing. Maybe it's summarizing podcast episodes, or drafting weekly client emails, or pulling data from a spreadsheet.
2. Train a Level 1 assistant on it. Feed the AI examples of how you'd normally do it. Let it learn your style. You now have a specialized tool, not a generic chatbot.
3. Hand it to an agent. This is the Level 1 → Level 2 jump. Instead of prompting it every time, set up a trigger — new podcast drops, run the summary workflow automatically. Now you're an operator, not a user.

Do that with one workflow. Then another. Then another. In 90 days, you're running a different business than you are today.

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The Bottom Line

Dan Martell is right that almost nobody sees what's coming. He's also right that the window to get ahead is narrow — probably 12 to 24 months before Level 2 becomes the baseline and Level 3 becomes the new differentiator. The people who figure out agent-based workflows right now are going to look like wizards in 2028. The people who are still asking Claude to write one email at a time are going to look like the folks who didn't get on Google Ads in 2008.

Here's my honest take: you don't need to hit Level 3 tomorrow. You need to stop living at Level 1. One workflow. One automation. One agent. Start there. That's how you stop being the 99% and start being part of the group quietly getting ahead.