AI Skills Are the New Business Currency

AI skills are no longer optional for founders who want to compete and win in 2026 — they are the single most powerful lever you can pull to compress years of hard work into days.

Right now, most business owners are still doing things the old way, spending weeks on market research, months on customer interviews, and thousands of pounds on content teams, design studios, and branding agencies, when the same results can be achieved in hours using the right tools and the right prompts.

Dan Murray built Heights to $30 million US, and the lessons drawn from that journey reveal a very clear picture of how AI skills, applied at the right time and in the right order, can completely transform the way a business is built.

Tools like flipitai are already helping creators and founders apply these exact AI skills to real business problems, and the founders who are learning how to use AI this way right now are the ones who will be impossible to compete with in the years ahead.

This article teaches seven AI skills that represent the full architecture of building a business from scratch, from the original idea all the way through to innovation and growth, and every single one of them is something you can start applying today.

AI Skill 1 — Using AI to Validate Your Why and Find Your Market Fast

Every business starts with a reason, a personal frustration, a problem that has not been solved well enough, or a gap in the market that only you can see clearly because you have lived it.

That personal connection, that authentic reason for building something, is something no AI tool in the world can manufacture for you, and any founder who skips this step and lets an algorithm define their purpose will struggle to build anything that lasts.

The AI skill here is not about replacing your why — it is about using AI to validate it quickly and gather the kind of market data that used to take weeks to collect.

A well-constructed prompt inside a tool like Gemini or ChatGPT, framed around a ten-year McKinsey researcher with experience at Mintel, asking how many people suffer from a specific problem, how many monthly searches exist across Europe or globally, and whether the market is growing year on year, will return data in minutes that would previously have taken an entire research sprint.

Dan Murray spent weeks doing this kind of research manually when he built Heights, digging into the connection between nutrition and insomnia before he ever launched a single product, and he is clear that today those same insights are accessible almost instantly with the right AI skills and the right prompt structure.

The key is to be specific with your prompt, give the AI a role and a context, ask it to evaluate the scale of the opportunity, and then push it to validate whether the market is trending upward or plateauing.

This is one of the most underused AI skills among early-stage founders, and it is also one of the highest-leverage things you can do before spending a single pound on product development.

Flipitai is a strong resource for founders learning how to structure these kinds of research prompts effectively and get reliable, detailed outputs from the major AI platforms.

AI Skill 2 — Simulating 200 Customer Interviews in Minutes With AI Personas

Customer research used to be the most time-consuming part of building a business, and for Dan Murray, conducting 200 real interviews with lawyers, accountants, and bankers to understand the Heights target audience took months of effort, coordination, and follow-up.

Today, one of the most powerful AI skills available to founders is the ability to simulate that same depth of insight by prompting an AI to take on the persona of a large, diverse customer group.

A well-structured prompt asking an AI to adopt the persona of 200 busy office workers, split evenly between men and women, distributed across specific age groups, and asked to respond to questions about pain points, desires, and buying behaviour, can return generalised data insights with remarkable accuracy.

The reason this works is that the data underpinning tools like ChatGPT and Gemini is vast enough to represent the collective thoughts, habits, and preferences of almost any demographic group you are likely to target.

This AI skill does not replace the value of real human conversations entirely, but it dramatically accelerates the discovery process, allowing founders to identify patterns, refine their messaging, and narrow their target audience before investing in any real-world research.

The ethical tension around data privacy is real, but the practical upside for market researchers and early-stage founders is equally real, and the founders who know how to use this AI skill well are conducting the equivalent of a full research sprint in the time it takes to write a few detailed prompts.

Flipitai is worth exploring here for founders who want structured support in building out their customer research prompts and persona frameworks using AI.

AI Skill 3 — Choosing the Right Channel With AI-Driven Distribution Strategy

One of the most common and costly mistakes founders make when building a business is spreading themselves too thin across too many channels too early, producing content for six platforms at once, none of them well, and wondering why nothing is gaining traction.

The AI skill that solves this is using a tool like ChatGPT or Gemini to analyse your product, your audience, and your resources, and then ask it to break down which channel gives you the clearest opportunity in year one, year two, and beyond.

A prompt that shares the product details, the target customer profile built in the previous step, and the budget and team size available, will return a ranked breakdown of channels along with the rough costs of starting on each one, the key opportunities, and the most likely challenges you will face.

Dan Murray built Heights on the back of a newsletter, growing to 20,000 subscribers before he ever launched a product on social media, and that focus on a single channel gave the business a depth of audience trust that was impossible to replicate by chasing virality on every platform at once.

Tools like Kit, Klaviyo, and Beehive remain powerful options for email-first founders in 2026, and the AI skill here is not just picking the channel but using AI to understand the economics of each option and make a data-informed decision rather than a gut-feel one.

The ability to ask a follow-up prompt after receiving a channel breakdown, drilling into the costs, conversion benchmarks, and competitive landscape of each option, is one of the most underestimated AI skills available to founders today.

Flipitai supports creators and founders in using AI tools to map their distribution strategy and identify the highest-leverage channels for their specific audience and growth stage.

AI Skill 4 — Building an Audience Before You Launch Using AI-Powered Marketing

The biggest marketing mistake most founders make is waiting until the product is ready before they start building an audience, treating the launch as the starting gun when the real work of building trust and anticipation should have started months earlier.

Dan Murray launched Heights to £30,000 in the first month not because the product was perfect, but because he had been building and nurturing an audience through a newsletter for over a year before a single unit was available to buy.

The AI skill here is using tools like Opus Clip, Gemini, and ChatGPT to produce content at scale that captures interest and brings potential customers into a world you are building, long before there is anything to sell them.

A prompt asking an AI to generate three social content ideas for a product in a specific niche, targeted at a defined audience persona, followed by a second prompt asking it to produce ten variations of each idea with different hooks, different openings, and different endings, produces a content engine that used to require a full creative team.

The ability to run AI-generated ads that reach millions of people, produce multiple creative variations quickly, and test different hooks and angles without a studio budget, is one of the most commercially powerful AI skills in 2026 for any founder building from scratch.

Email remains the most reliable place to capture and nurture that attention, because unlike social platforms, your list belongs to you, and the data you build through consistent email communication becomes one of the most valuable assets in the business.

Flipitai is built for creators who want to use AI to grow their audience and monetise their content more effectively, and it is a strong starting point for founders who want to build their marketing engine before their product is even finished.

AI Skill 5 — Designing a Premium Product Experience Using AI Creative Tools

The physical and visual experience of a product is one of the most underrated drivers of buying behaviour, and the brands that understand this design their packaging, their onboarding, and their customer journey with the same intentionality that luxury perfume houses apply to every bottle, box, and in-store presentation.

Dan Murray and his business partner studied how premium brands in the Selfridges perfume hall used design, packaging, and sensory experience to attract and retain customers, and they applied those same psychological principles to the way Heights products were presented to the world.

Today, the AI skill that makes this accessible to every founder is the ability to use tools like Midjourney, Canva AI, or platforms like Nano Banana to generate packaging concepts, branding directions, and visual identity ideas in minutes, testing ten different design approaches before committing to a single direction.

A prompt asking an AI to show what is succeeding visually in a specific product category, followed by a request to generate ten design concepts that differentiate from the top ten brands in that space, and then a third prompt asking how the customer experience could be made more memorable at every touchpoint, produces a creative brief that used to take an agency weeks to develop.

This AI skill is not about removing human creativity from the equation — it is about accelerating the exploration phase so that the human decisions being made are informed by a much wider set of options than any individual designer could generate alone.

Flipitai helps creators and founders apply AI tools to their branding and content output, making it easier to maintain quality and consistency at scale without a large creative team.

AI Skill 6 — Using AI to Define Your Company Values and Build a Hiring Framework

The culture of a company is not something that can be outsourced or automated, but one of the most valuable AI skills available to founders today is using AI to structure the process of defining values and building an interview framework that tests for cultural alignment at every hire.

Dan Murray invested in leadership psychology sessions and spent significant time and money working through frameworks that helped define what Heights stood for at its core, because he understood that a business built on inauthentic values would eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.

Today, a founder can prompt an AI to present five different psychological values frameworks, explain the methodology behind each one, and highlight the differences between them, before taking a structured test and then using the results to build a set of interview questions that genuinely probe for alignment with those values.

The AI skill here goes beyond just generating content — it is about using AI as a thinking partner to do the deep work of identity and culture that shapes everything from how you hire, to how you communicate, to how you respond when things go wrong.

Tools like flipitai are increasingly used by founders who want to apply structured AI thinking to the human side of their business, including team building, values alignment, and leadership development.

The output of this process, a clear values profile combined with a set of interview questions calibrated to test for those values, is something that used to require a professional organisational psychologist and is now accessible to any founder willing to put the right prompts into a capable AI tool.

AI Skill 7 — Using AI to Run Rapid Testing and Innovate Before You Stagnate

Every business hits a ceiling, a point where the messaging that worked brilliantly in the early stages stops converting, the audience that was perfectly defined begins to evolve, and the product that launched with momentum starts to feel like it is losing its edge.

Dan Murray and the Heights team were stuck at £5 million for two full years, unable to break through despite strong early growth, and the breakthrough came not from a new product or a new channel, but from a messaging change — renaming a product from the Smart Supplement to Vitals — that was validated through systematic landing page testing before it was ever rolled out fully.

The AI skill here is using AI to generate ten or twenty new product name options, positioning statements, or messaging angles in minutes, and then running rapid paid tests across platforms like Meta Andromeda to identify which one drives the highest click-through and conversion rates before committing to a full rebrand.

This approach, which used to require a team of copywriters, a long briefing process, and weeks of manual testing, can now be compressed into days using a combination of AI-generated creative variations and real-time paid media testing.

The founders who build this AI skill into their regular operating rhythm, testing messaging, naming, offers, and creative constantly rather than only when growth stalls, are the ones who never get stuck at a ceiling for long.

Flipitai is designed to support exactly this kind of iterative, AI-powered creative testing, helping founders and creators move faster and validate ideas before they invest heavily in any single direction.

If you are building a business in 2026 and you have not yet built a system for rapid testing using AI skills, this is the single most important habit you can develop, because the businesses that will dominate the next decade are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest teams — they are the ones that test faster, learn faster, and adapt faster than everyone else.

Final Thoughts — AI Skills Are the Foundation of Every Scalable Business in 2026

Building a business from scratch has never been more accessible, more accelerated, or more dependent on the quality of your AI skills than it is right now.

From validating your market in minutes to simulating customer research, designing premium products, building audiences before launch, defining company values, and running rapid innovation cycles, the seven AI skills covered in this article represent a complete operating system for building a modern business at speed.

None of them replace the need for genuine passion, authentic purpose, or hard work, but every single one of them removes the bottlenecks that used to slow founders down for months or years at a time.

Start using flipitai as part of your AI toolkit, build these seven AI skills into your daily workflow, and commit to testing, learning, and adapting faster than any competitor in your space.

The founders who master these AI skills right now are not just building better businesses — they are building businesses that are structurally impossible to compete with by anyone still doing things the old way.

We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.