The Premier League season is almost over. It has been a hard year to watch Liverpool. And Arsenal will most likely be champions. Which hurts. Though knowing them, there's still time to bottle it.
The more I watched this season, the more I kept thinking about how spoiled I was as a fan to have Jürgen Klopp.
Not because of the trophies. Because of what he built and how he built it.
One line from a podcast he was on has been living rent free in my head.
"How can we get the best out of people if you treat them all the same? It's crazy."
He treated every player differently. Not because he played favorites. Because a 22-year-old Trent Alexander-Arnold needed something completely different than a 35-year-old James Milner. One needed freedom to express himself. The other needed to know he was still trusted.
Uniformity, he said, is the enemy of potential.
I think about this every time I watch someone use AI. Most people pick one tool and use it for everything. One model. One approach. One result.
That's not a strategy. That's a habit.
Here's how I actually think about my AI team:
-
ChatGPT Mohamed Salah
The name everyone knows. The one everyone downloads first. First name on the starting 11 sheet.
-
NotebookLM Roberto Firmino
Does the invisible work. Takes raw material and makes it useful for everyone around him. Never in the headlines but the system works differently without him.
-
Perplexity Andrew Robertson
Never stops running. Covers every inch of ground. Built for one thing and relentless at it.
-
Claude Virgil van Dijk
The anchor. Everything serious gets built around him. Calm under pressure. You don't realize how much you rely on him until you are out of tokens.
Klopp didn't win because he had one great player. He won because he understood the role each player needed to play.
Same principle. Different game.
The future of AI work is not prompting. It's orchestration.