I Met a Guy Who Trains AI for a Living
By Meredith's Husband | June 29, 2026
If you read my email, you know how this started. I was at an event a few weeks ago, talking to a guy I'd just met, and he told me he worked in AI training. I asked who he worked for. TELUS. I asked if they were based in New York.
He looked at me like I was the biggest idiot he'd ever met.
"We're everywhere," he said.
I nodded as if to say, "Oh yeah, right, I forgot," but I hadn't forgotten anything. I'd never heard of the company, and honestly, I'd never even heard of the industry. I looked it up that night. TELUS has over a million people working for them, training AI. Some of their competitors are a similar size.
AI training is not programming. It's not prompt building. It's literally just feeding information into an AI.
Here's the part that actually matters for you and me. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, none of these were created to solve specific problems. They were not trained to be SEO consultants. They were created to be general all-purpose tools that can do most things better than most people. They were not trained to do one thing in particular.
AI is like a blank canvas.
Training for specific tasks like SEO comes from the research that the AI does on the internet, which means whatever you ask gets filtered through a giant pile of content that includes good information, outdated information, and flat-out wrong information, all mixed together with no way for the AI to sort one from the other on its own.
That's garbage in, garbage out.
Feed AI a mess, you get a mess back, but it's delivered with total confidence.
So training is critical to get quality information out of AI. The important part is that you don't necessarily need to be an expert to do that training. You just need time and a good source of information.
You can and should begin training your AI to be helpful to you.
It's easiest to do that one area at a time. In other words, don't expect or try to train AI to be helpful to you in all areas of your life at once. Begin with a single area first.
That could be health. That could be productivity. That could be nutrition. That could be managing your finances. I'm not going to tell you what area of your life to apply this to. I tried thinking about it that way myself, and it didn't work.
If you think of an area off the top of your head, that's fine. You don't need to pick something right now. Instead, just plant the seed.
Go about your normal life, and pay attention. At some point you're going to run into a moment where you think, "I wish I had an expert to help me with this." That's the trigger. You'll recognize it when it shows up, because you'll have planted the idea ahead of time.
When that moment hits, that's when you start training your own expert.
I did this first with my health. Specifically my sleep, which has been an issue for me for years. Then I expanded it to exercise, my nutrition and diet, and then even my blood work and cholesterol (something else I've struggled with for years).
I didn't do this in one conversation. It turned into an ongoing project, multiple conversations, all building on each other, all feeding the AI more context every time. It's not perfect, but it's mine, built specifically around me, not around whatever the internet happened to say about sleep or cholesterol in general.
By the way, my cholesterol numbers dropped from all being in the unhealthy range to all being in the healthy range. That's in the last 12 months, after increasing for several years in a row. (you may remember this from a previous newsletter, although at that point, I hadn't actually gotten my blood work done yet)
You could do the same thing with learning a new skill. Finance. Work. Personal organization. Whatever it ends up being for you, the shape of it stays the same: notice the moment, start feeding it information, or telling it specifically what information to use, and let it grow.
Even if your first attempt at this doesn't blow you away, you're still building something important. You're learning how to work with AI in a way that's going to matter more, not less, as this technology keeps moving.
Think of it like literacy. Not a nice-to-have skill. The baseline skill for whatever the AI revolution actually ends up looking like.
That guy I met didn't have a technical background. That industry exists because it understands something most people haven't caught onto yet:
AI isn't something that arrives and fixes your problems. It's something that lets you teach it how to fix your problems.
I hope this helps,
~ Meredith's Husband
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