In the late 1990s, when DSL was just rolling out, I signed up almost immediately. If I remember right, it was about $70 a month. At the time, dial-up internet ran somewhere between $10 and $20 a month. So on paper, I was paying three or four times more for the same thing everyone else already had.

It’s a hard story to tell now, because anyone who actually lived it is in their fifties or older. We take the modern internet completely for granted. Pages appear the instant you tap a link. Video and audio stream without a thought. Everything is always on.

Back then, none of that was true. Dial-up topped out at 56K. In today’s terms that’s 0.056 Mbps. A single web page could take most of a minute to draw itself onto the screen, one slow row of pixels at a time. Downloading one song could take an hour. You planned your evening around it.

DSL was only 1.5 Mbps, which sounds almost quaint today. But it was roughly thirty times faster than dial-up, and it was always connected. No dial tone, no screeching handshake, no getting kicked offline when someone picked up the phone. For me, everything changed overnight.

So I did what you do when something is that much better. I told everyone. Friends, family, coworkers. And I was met with a wall of resistance. Why would anyone pay $70 a month when they were paying $20? I had DSL for two or three months and could not convert a single person.

The night it clicked

Around the three-month mark, we happened to have a gathering at the house, a bunch of friends and family over. Someone asked if they could use my computer to hop online. Sure, I said. They went to my room and came back a couple of minutes later, a little confused, asking how to dial in.

You’re already connected, I told them.

They didn’t believe me. So I walked back with them and asked them to type in a website. It popped up instantly. And they said, “See, it’s not really online. It’s just showing the cached version.”

For anyone younger: back then, if a page appeared instantly on dial-up, it usually meant your browser was showing something it had already saved, not something it had just fetched. Instant meant fake.

No, I said. That’s live. Type in a different address. They did. It loaded just as fast. And I watched their face change. I said, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for three months.”

By the end of the night, others were taking turns on my computer. Two or three of them signed up for DSL the very next day. Not because I finally found the right words. Because they finally felt it.

The DSL moment

That’s the whole pattern, and I’ve come to rely on it whenever I’m trying to move a person or an organization that’s resistant to change.

You cannot argue someone out of what I’d call dial-up thinking. Dial-up thinking isn’t stupidity or stubbornness. It’s the reasonable, evidence-based conclusion that what you have is fine, because the person has no lived reference for the alternative. Faster is just a word until it happens to you. My friends weren’t wrong to doubt me. They were missing the one thing that changes everything, which is the experience itself.

I’ve started calling that the DSL moment. The instant a skeptic stops debating the idea and feels the difference firsthand. Before it, no amount of explaining lands. After it, no explaining is needed. The job was never to make a better argument. The job was to get them in front of it.

We are back in 1997

I believe we’re in that exact situation right now with agentic AI. Not AI chat. I mean using AI to do real work: hand it an outcome, let it plan the steps, and let it execute while you review.

Think about where the web was in 1997. The overwhelming majority of the world didn’t even have a website. Not most businesses, not most people, almost no one. That’s roughly where agentic AI sits today. Most of the world isn’t using it. A lot of people are using AI chat, which is genuinely useful, but that’s the dial-up version of what’s now possible. The always-on, does-the-work version is still a narrow lane most people have never stepped into.

And the path to crossing that gap is the same as it was for DSL. You kind of have to experience the value before you’ll believe it’s worth changing your habits for. You need a DSL moment.

Here’s the part I can’t help. When I watch someone doing something manually that I know an agent could do ten times faster, I cringe a little. Rebuilding a report by hand every week. Copying data between systems. Slowly typing out an email that could be drafted in seconds. I feel the same pull I felt at that party, wanting to lean over and say, let me just show you.

What to actually do this week

If you’re not doing this yet, my ask is simple. Download and start using an agent, not a chatbot. Claude Cowork is one. ChatGPT Work, which OpenAI released last week, is another. Pick whichever fits the tools you already live in.

Then don’t use it to answer questions. Take the single most tedious thing you have to do this week, the task you dread, and hand it over as an outcome. Let it do the work while you watch. Do that a few times and you’ll build the muscle memory, and more importantly you’ll start seeing where it fits in your day. That’s the skill now. Not prompting. Noticing what to delegate.

If you have more complex problems or business processes that you always assumed would be too expensive to automate, that’s the kind of thing my team at Qandaba does, and I’m happy to talk it through. Book a free assessment here.

And if you’re reading this already convinced, already delegating real work to agents, then you’re the person at the party with DSL. You already know that telling people rarely works. So show them. Sit a friend, a family member, or a coworker down in front of it and let them feel it. Sometimes that’s the only thing that gets someone on board. It’s how I finally got anyone to try DSL, and it’s how most people are going to cross into this next thing too.