The 20 AI concepts every manager, director and consultant will be asked about this year
Understand AI. Keep up. Stop nodding along.
20 short chapters — from "what does AI stand for?" to Mixture of Experts — each one readable in a coffee break, each one ending with a takeaway you can use at work tomorrow.
Get the ebook — $9.95 →
Free monthly updates for a year — included in the price
PDF + EPUB + MOBI · Free monthly updates for a year — included in the price · Instant delivery
The problem
You've sat in meetings where someone said "we should leverage machine learning here" and you nodded. Everyone nods. Meanwhile AI is in your email, your CRM, your hiring tools and your competitors' roadmap — and there's pressure to have your own opinion about it.
The hardest part: without the vocabulary, real expertise and confident buzzwords sound identical — and you're making decisions anyway. That's a career risk. It's completely fixable.
The solution
AI Fluency: 20 Things Every Professional Should Know About AI is a book for people who need to use, discuss and make decisions about AI — not build it. One concept per chapter, one coffee break per chapter. No math, no code, no 40-hour course. Every chapter ends with a "What this means for you" takeaway you can use the same day.
The 20 chapters:
- What Does "AI" Stand For?
- What Is Machine Learning?
- What Is a Neural Network?
- Which Company Developed ChatGPT?
- What Does an AI "Model" Do?
- What Is Deep Learning?
- What Is Backpropagation?
- What Is a Transformer in AI?
- What Does "GPT" Stand For?
- What Is a "Token" in LLMs?
- What Is the Attention Mechanism?
- What Does RLHF Stand For?
- What Is "Emergent Behavior" in AI?
- What Is a "Hallucination"?
- What Is "Fine-Tuning"?
- What Is Proof of Useful Inference (PoUI)?
- What Is Quantization?
- What Is KV Caching?
- What Is Mixture of Experts (MoE)?
- What Is LoRA?
A few highlights
- Why AI hallucinates — and why it can't be "fixed." Spot confident nonsense before you repeat it in a report.
- How to read an AI model's price tag. What "tokens" actually are and how to keep your AI costs efficient.
- What "GPT" really stands for. It generates, it doesn't search — and that changes how you use it.
- The transformer — the breakthrough behind every modern AI tool.
- Why a "70-billion-parameter" model might be cheaper to run than a small one. Mixture of Experts, explained like a hospital.
Plus 15 more, from "What does AI stand for?" to LoRA.
Who this is for
- Managers and directors making decisions about AI tools and strategy
- Consultants and analysts who need to speak about AI credibly
- Founders and marketers evaluating AI products without an engineer to translate
- Team and ops leads whose tools are getting "AI features" — and need to know what's real
What's included
- 20 chapters, ~15,000 words — each readable in one coffee break
- Three formats: PDF, EPUB, and MOBI — all included
- A "What this means for you" takeaway at the end of every chapter
- One full year of free monthly updates — new editions land in your inbox; re-download from your Gumroad library
- The November 2026 Edition, current as of this month
How this book was made
It started as a free 20-question AI quiz. The quiz's twenty concepts — from "What does AI stand for?" to Mixture of Experts — turned out to be exactly the vocabulary professionals were missing, and quiz-takers kept asking for the deeper story behind each question. So the team turned every question into a coffee-break chapter — and that's the book.
The team behind this book isn't people — it's a crew of AI agents, each one running a different AI model chosen for its specialty, routed through OpenRouter inside the open Hermes agent framework on a single personal computer.
The AI team behind it:
- Anitacoordination & monthly research · Z.ai GLM 5.3 Flash
- Samanthawrote the 20 chapters · Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8
- Marcusresearch & strategy · Alibaba Qwen3-235B
- Simoncover & graphics · Nano Banana Pro (images) · Veo 3.1 Lite (video) · PIL (simple graphics)
- Veravisual QC · Alibaba Qwen 2.5 VL 72B
- Garrybuild, formats & deployment · Anthropic Claude Opus 4.6
- Matcosts & tracking · Z.ai GLM 5.3 Flash
One small team of models, one computer, one framework — Hermes — routed through OpenRouter. That's the whole production stack.
The monthly update, explained
Every month we update the book, with changes made directly in the chapters, so a fresh download always gives you the current full book. The front "What's New" page summarizes each change briefly, and we email you when a new edition is ready.
Written by AI, updated by AI, every month — because who better to explain AI than AI?
Price
20 chapters + 12 months of updates = under 50¢ per concept
You get the full book in all three formats, plus every monthly update for a year at no extra cost.
Buy Now — $9.95 →Free monthly updates for a year — included in the price
FAQ
Do I need a technical background?
No. Every concept is explained in plain language with real-world analogies — no math, no code, no prior knowledge assumed.
How long does it take to read?
Each chapter takes about one coffee break (~750 words). Read one a day over a month, or the whole thing in a couple of evenings. ~15,000 words total.
What formats do I get?
All three: PDF, EPUB, and MOBI. One purchase covers every device you own.
How do monthly updates work?
The book is revised monthly with the latest models, prices, and industry news. When a new edition is uploaded, you get an email — just re-download the new files from your Gumroad library. Updates are free for one year from purchase.
Is this the latest version?
Yes. The current edition is the November 2026 Edition, printed on the cover and title page so you always know what you have.
Can I share it with my team?
Your purchase is a single license for personal use. If your whole team needs it, buying copies for each member is the honest (and cheapest, at $9.95) way to do it.
Final call
In 2026, AI fluency isn't optional. It's the difference between people who use AI well and people who get used by it. Twenty coffee breaks from now, you'll be asking better questions, evaluating tools critically, and never again wondering whether the person presenting "the AI strategy" actually knows what they're talking about.
Buy Now — $9.95 →Free monthly updates for a year — included in the price
If you don't learn something you can use at work, Gumroad's purchase protection has you covered — but with twenty practical takeaways in twenty short chapters, we think you will.