A coach walked up to a Jamaican teenager in an American high school and told him to try a game he had never seen played. The kid had come to this country for one thing, an education, and he had noticed that other people were paying for theirs with sports scholarships. So he played every sport he could play. Then the coach pointed him at American football, on the argument that football would get him the scholarship. His own description of how familiar that game is in Jamaica is short: “We do not do that.”
He played anyway. A few years later he had a full scholarship.
I have interviewed a lot of people for this summit, and I keep noticing that the ones with the best AI advice almost never start by talking about AI. Jermaine Malcolm is the CEO of Skills Gap Advocate, a company that exists because of that football season, and when I asked him about his YouXAI talk he answered with something a lot less fashionable than a tool recommendation.
What his company actually does, and why it matters here
Skills Gap Advocate works on the back end of other people’s programs. If a chamber of commerce or an accelerator is trying to move a room full of small business owners from where they are to where they could be, Jermaine’s team builds the thing that moves them. He used a phrase for it that I have not been able to shake: “the operating system for an accelerator.” His focus is workforce development and entrepreneurship, and his customers are usually communities rather than individuals.
That is the part that made him a natural fit for a summit in Waco. Skills Gap Advocate deliberately works with small and medium sized cities, and Jermaine’s reason for that is a reading of the moment we are in. “Right now we are at this pivotal point in history where there is a leveling that’s taking place,” he told me, “and not everyone is able to take advantage of it. Especially those that are in small, medium-sized cities.” His whole business is aimed at that gap. He works with those places so they do not get left behind while the leveling happens somewhere else.
We are holding YouXAI in Waco for the same reason, and we want to take it to Lubbock and Asheville and Eugene next. So I will admit I was already sympathetic. What surprised me was where he took the conversation after that.
The coach’s lesson, which turned into a company
I asked Jermaine how he got from Jamaica to Waco, and the football story came out. He came to the United States during his high school years with the goal already fixed. “Really I came here for an education,” he said. “I tell the story all the time that I came here with that mission.” Sports were the visible path to a scholarship, so he played every sport available to him. A coach convinced him to try football on the argument that it would get him to college. He had no frame of reference for the game at all.
“I did not know football,” he said, “but trusted the process, and trusted the coach.”
Then he said the thing that explains everything else he does for a living. “It was that point where I understood from a coach that if you can help someone to bridge that gap of what they know and their potential, then how can you apply this for those that really need it?”
That sentence is the company. Skills Gap Advocate identifies the resources, identifies the right practitioners, and puts them in front of the people who need that specific skill. When I said out loud that the football season sounded like the DNA of the business, he did not soften it. “That’s it. That’s the exact DNA of SGA.”
There is a second thread in there that is easy to miss. He talked about community as much as he talked about skills. “There’s an epidemic of loneliness, and we’re just trying to get more people together.” In person, online, either one. The skills are the reason people show up. The room is what makes them stay.
The core insight: build you, not a copy of somebody else
Here is where his talk lands, and here is where he separates from almost every other piece of AI advice I have read this year.
The default advice is to go look at what is being built. Read about the tools, watch what the frontier companies are shipping, and find your opportunity in the new capability. Jermaine’s starting point is the opposite direction. “A lot of people are struggling where to start with AI,” he said, and his answer is that you start where you already are, because that is where the most opportunity is.
Then he said this, which is the line I would put on the wall:
“Understanding your skill set, understanding your competencies, your experiences, and how to pair all of that together, so it’s not foreign to you, so it doesn’t feel like you’re building something new, but it actually feels like you’re building you.”
Read that again with a beginner in mind. The reason most people bounce off AI is that every entry point on offer asks them to become someone else first. Learn to prompt. Learn to build agents. Learn the stack. Jermaine’s entry point asks them to inventory what they already know and then use the tool to package it. The skill is already yours. The tool only has to make it sellable.
His session at YouXAI, Mine Your Business, is built as a hands-on audit around exactly that. His own written description of it says attendees walk out with a monetization idea tied to expertise they already have and a concrete next action, and that it needs no technical background. That is a different promise from most AI sessions, and it is the one this audience actually needs.
The second framework: test the idea before you bet on it
The other half of his session is about the discovery loop, and this is where the time savings get concrete.
The old sequence for anyone with a business idea was long and expensive. You had a hunch. You built something to test the hunch, which for software meant somewhere between two and five months of work. Then you took it out into the world and learned whether the hunch was any good. By the time you had the answer you had spent the money and the months, and plenty of people quit somewhere in the middle of that stretch without ever finding out.
Jermaine’s account of the same sequence now is measured in hours. “Now you can go, you can build something within a couple hours. Then you can go out there and actually test it. You can watch people and see how they’re interacting with it.” The data that comes back from that test used to require someone who could crunch it. Now the same assistant that built the thing reads the results. So does the messaging problem underneath it, the one where the product is fine and nobody understands the pitch. “You don’t have to have a full team in order to do that.”
His summary of the whole change: you can now find out whether an idea has traction “in a day or two” rather than months.
He also walked me through the two terms that get thrown around in these conversations without ever being defined, which I appreciated, because I think half the audience nods along without knowing. A minimum viable product is the core functionality of the thing you are making, stripped to the question of how people get this done at all today. Product market fit is the next question, whether enough people exist in a market that can grow to keep buying it and make it a real business. The method between the two is constant feedback and quick iterations. Test it, refine it, build, put it back out there, repeat until people are paying.
I said out loud what that means for a founder without a cushion, and he agreed. Every month between the idea and the first revenue is a month somebody has to survive. Bootstrappers feel that most, and funded founders feel it too, because the investors want to see something. Compressing the loop compresses the wait for the payoff. For a person doing this without a windfall to live on, that is the difference between finishing and quitting.
The proof he gave from his own desk
The most convincing part of the interview was not about entrepreneurs at all. It was about him.
Jermaine has been building programs for 12 to 15 years. When I asked for an example, he described the old process without any nostalgia. Understand the audience. Then “hunch down at my desk for hours, weeks” building the thing. Then figure out how to get it onto slides so it reads well enough to be approved. He called it what it was, a very tedious manual process.
The new version of the same job goes like this. He points an agent at the research and gets it back in bulk. He brings his own methodology and his own pathway to the table, which is the part no tool supplies. He goes back and forth with the assistant until the program is finished, in “a few hours or less.” Then he moves it into Gamma or Claude, builds the presentation, and pitches it to a sponsor or a partner.
His timeline for the whole thing, start to pitch: about a week.
I want to be precise about what is doing the work in that story. The methodology is his, built over fifteen years. The judgment about what belongs in the program is his. The research, the assembly and the deck are the parts that moved. That is the same line he draws for everyone else, applied to his own work, and it is the reason the advice holds up. He is not describing a shortcut he read about.
The line that reframes the whole thing
Near the end he said something that I have thought about more than anything else in the interview.
“For a very long time, speed has always been the advantage. Those that can get to market faster, those that can get data and insight faster, and then be able to move quickly, those are the ones that were rewarded. And so now we’re on a more equal plane where we can actually get things done at a reasonable time.”
Speed was always the thing that won. The problem was that speed used to be purchased. A team, a budget, an analyst, a designer, a research department. If you had those, you moved fast, and if you did not, you moved at the speed of one person working nights. The advantage tracked the money.
What Jermaine is describing is a change in who can afford the advantage. His own qualifier is honest about how far it goes: “It’s just asking the right questions, having the right prompts. Using the right tools.” Those are learnable, and they are exactly what a room full of people in Waco can walk out with.
One more thing, because it says something about where this goes
I asked him whether any of this was headed back to Jamaica. He had been home in November, and he had been having conversations with government ministries about AI while he was there.
His read on the region was flat and confident. “The Caribbean, especially in areas like Jamaica, Puerto Rico, they’re doing their thing in AI. They’re not sleeping on it.”
I bring it up because the small-city argument he made at the top of our conversation scales further than Waco. The leveling is either real everywhere or it is real nowhere. He seems to think it is real everywhere, and he is spending his own time proving it in two places at once.
What this means for you
If you have been putting off starting with AI because you do not know where to begin, Jermaine’s answer is not a tool. It is an inventory. Write down what you already do well, what you have already been paid for, what people already ask you about. That list is the raw material. The tool comes second, and it only has to help you package, price and sell what is on the list.
And if you have an idea you have been carrying around for a year because building it looked like a six month commitment, the honest version of the math has changed. You can find out in a day or two whether anybody wants it. Finding out cheaply is now available to you.
Jermaine speaks first thing in the morning at YouXAI on September 12, at the Performing Arts Community Center in Waco. His session is a working session, so bring the thing you already know how to do.
Register at youxai.live. Tickets are $79 through August 31 and $99 after that.
See you in Waco,
Fernando
P.S. The idea we spent the most time on in this interview came up before I hit record. He mentioned using AI to test things and figure out whether to give up or double down, and I asked him to say it again on camera. It turned into half the conversation.