You already know AI is the job now. The question is whether you're going to spend the next year assembling the playbook yourself - - or borrow ours for the price of a sandwich.

Let me put the whole pitch on the table in one line, because you're busy and I respect that:

For $4.99, you can start a trial of the AI Central library - - 1,200+ tested AI tutorials, organized and curated - - or you can go build the equivalent yourself over the next 12 months. This newsletter is the case for the first option.

Start your $4.99 trial here

Here's a number that stopped me cold when I first read it.

McKinsey's research on knowledge work put it bluntly: "employees spend 1.8 hours every day - - 9.3 hours per week, on average - - searching and gathering information. Put another way, businesses hire 5 employees but only 4 show up to work; the fifth is off searching for answers, but not contributing any value."

Nearly a full day, every week, finding things rather than doing things.

Now layer AI on top of that.

There are more than 50,000 AI tools in the world right now (one count puts the publicly listed ones north of 16,000, with thousands more launching every month). And the pace isn't slowing - - between November 17 and December 11, 2025, four major labs shipped flagship models on top of each other - - xAI's Grok 4.1, Google's Gemini 3, Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5, and OpenAI's GPT-5.2 - - each one briefly crowned "best in the world" before the next one landed. Four frontier releases in 25 days.

You are trying to keep up with a field that re-prices itself every few weeks.

So the honest question isn't "should I learn AI?" You've answered that. The question is: who is doing the filtering?

Because someone has to. Either you spend your evenings reading release notes and testing prompts that half-work - - or someone who does this full-time hands you the version that already works.

See what's inside the library - - $4.99 to start

I want to be fair to you. You absolutely could build this yourself.

You're smart. You can open ChatGPT, read a few threads, watch some YouTube, and figure most of this out. Nobody's gatekeeping the knowledge.

But "you could do it yourself" is the most expensive sentence in business.

Let me show you the real bill.

Say you wanted to assemble what's already sitting in the AI Central library - - 1,200+ tutorials, each one tested, each one written up so you can actually use it. Walk through what one good tutorial actually takes:

Be generous and call that two to three hours per tutorial. (It's usually more.)

1,200 tutorials x 2.5 hours = 3,000 hours.

Three thousand hours is not a weekend project. At 10 hours a week - - which is a lot to carve out when you already have a job - - that's nearly six years.

Put a dollar figure on it. The average independent consultant in the US bills $150 to $200 an hour in 2026. A sitting CEO's time runs about $391 an hour by Salary.com's benchmark. Even if you value your own hour at a conservative $100, those 3,000 hours represent $300,000 of your time.

You're not going to do that. Of course you're not. Nobody is.

What you'll actually do is the thing most professionals do: dabble. Grab a prompt here, bookmark a tool there, mean to "really get into it" next quarter. And the field will keep moving while you keep meaning to.

That's the trap. Not that the knowledge is hidden - - that assembling it yourself quietly costs you a fortune in the one thing you can't buy back.

Skip the 3,000 hours. Start for $4.99

I'm not going to wave my hands and say "tons of content." Let me walk you through the actual library, by theme. These are real tutorials, with their real titles.

AI productivity - - get hours back

Prompt engineering - - the skill under all the other skills

Marketing and growth - - turn AI into pipeline

Content creation and design - - ship work that looks expensive

Build and automate - - go from user to builder

Finance, strategy, and the day job

Learning, research, and career

And that's a sampler. There are over 1,200 of these, and we keep adding as the tools change (when a new model drops, the library moves with it - - you don't have to).

Notice what they have in common: every one is a "do this, get that" tutorial. Not theory. Not "AI will change everything" think-pieces. The kind of thing you can open at 9am and use by 9:20.

Browse the full 1,200+ library

Here's the part people underestimate.

The problem in 2026 isn't access to information. It's the opposite - - you're drowning in it. Research compiled this year found 80% of workers now experience information overload, up from 60% in 2020. The internet made everyone a publisher, which means most of what you'll find when you search is half-right, out of date, or written by someone who never actually tested it.

A curated library does one thing a search bar can't: it filters with a point of view.

Everything in AI Central was tested before it earned a spot. Someone sat down, ran the prompt, watched it fail, fixed it, and only then wrote it up. That's the difference between "here are 40 tabs of maybe" and "here's the one that works, do this."

This matters more than it used to, because AI has a quiet tax most people don't see. Zapier's "AI Workslop" survey of more than 1,100 US enterprise AI users (January 2026) found that while 92% of workers say AI boosts their productivity, "the average employee spends 4.5 hours per week - - more than half a workday - - revising, correcting, and sometimes completely redoing AI-generated outputs."

Bad prompts and untested techniques don't just waste the time you spend learning them. They waste the time you spend fixing what they break.

Curation is how you stop paying that tax.

Now I want to show you the most important numbers in this whole newsletter.

The London School of Economics, through its Inclusion Initiative with Protiviti, surveyed nearly 3,000 workers and 240 executives globally for its 2025 report Bridging the Generational AI Gap. The headline finding: professionals using AI save an average of 7.5 hours a week - - worth around £14,000 per employee per year, or the equivalent of a full workday handed back to you.

But here's the catch buried in the same study: "Those with training are 2x more productive, saving 11 hours per week compared with 5 hours for the untrained." More than double the return, from the same tools, separated only by whether someone taught them how.

And most people never get taught. The same LSE research found that "most employees (68%) have received no AI training in the past 12 months, leaving substantial efficiency gains unrealised." PwC's 2025 Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey, covering 49,843 workers across 48 economies, found only 14% are using generative AI daily - - the rest are dabbling. And EY's 2025 Work Reimagined research is sharper still: employees with 81 or more hours of AI training a year save 14 hours per week, versus a median of 8 - - the real jump kicks in only after dozens of hours of focused learning.

Read that again. The payoff is real, it's large, and it's gated behind learning that almost nobody actually does.

This is the whole game. The professionals pulling ahead aren't using secret tools. They're using the same ChatGPT you have - - with training you don't.

A curated tutorial library is the fastest, cheapest way to close that gap. You're not signing up for an 81-hour course. You're getting 1,200+ pre-built lessons you pull from exactly when you need them, in the five minutes between meetings.

Close the training gap - - $4.99

I'll be direct, because pretending otherwise would insult you.

Here's what the alternatives to a curated AI library actually cost:

And then there's AI Central:

$4.99 to start.

That's not a typo. The trial is the price of a coffee.

Let me stack up plainly what you're stepping into:

The reason I can offer the trial at $4.99 isn't that the work is cheap. It's that the work is already done. We spent the 3,000 hours so you can spend five minutes. The library exists. The cost of letting one more person in is basically nothing - - so the price reflects that, not the value.

Start the trial - - $4.99

Let me answer the things you're reasonably thinking.

"I'm too senior for tutorials." The opposite, actually. Gallup's 2026 workplace data shows leaders and managers are the heaviest AI users in the workforce - - they just don't have time to assemble the knowledge themselves. This library is built for exactly that: people who could figure it out but whose hour is worth far too much to spend figuring it out.

"I don't have time to learn another thing." That's the point of curation. You're not setting aside a weekend. You open one tutorial, use it, close it. The whole model is built around the five minutes you actually have, not the eighty hours you don't.

"There's free stuff everywhere." There is. And you'll spend 4.5 hours a week sorting the working free stuff from the broken free stuff. Free isn't free when it costs you your afternoons. (Also: it's $4.99. We're not exactly asking you to remortgage anything.)

"What if it's not for me?" Then you're out the price of a coffee, and there's a 30-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee behind the membership anyway. The risk here is mathematically tiny. The risk of not closing your AI training gap while your peers close theirs - - that's the expensive one.

Strip away everything and here's the decision in front of you.

Door one: you keep meaning to get to it. You dabble. You bookmark things. The models keep shipping, the tools keep multiplying, and the gap between you and the trained few slowly widens. It doesn't cost you anything today - - which is exactly why it's so easy to choose, and so expensive over a year.

Door two: you spend $4.99, you borrow 3,000 hours of already-done work, and the next time you need to write the ad, build the agent, fix the deck, or audit the competitor - - it's already on the shelf, tested, waiting.

One of these is a decision. The other is just drift.

You didn't get to where you are by drifting.

Open the door - - start your $4.99 trial

Cheers, Alex

Alex Fiore, Founder & CEO, AI Central

P.S. - - The thing about the time-cost math is that it only runs one direction. Every week you wait, the field adds more tools, more models, more noise for you to eventually sort through yourself. The library, meanwhile, sorts it for you and only gets bigger. The cheapest day to start was a year ago. The second cheapest is today, for $4.99. Start here.