Gary Vaynerchuk
CEO of VaynerMedia
The marketing mogul and internet-hustle evangelist has made AI adoption his latest gospel — using ChatGPT as his “strategy thinker,” telling employees to “AI the f–k out of” their work, and calling the moment the biggest financial opportunity for young entrepreneurs.
In his words
Did we not learn from calculators or the internet? We go through this every time.
I want you to work less if you want — you can work three hours instead of nine, but you need to AI the f–k out of that.
Biography
Gary Vaynerchuk (born 1975 in Babruysk, Belarus) grew his family’s New Jersey liquor store into Wine Library through early e-commerce and YouTube, then built VaynerMedia into a major ad agency on the strength of being early to every platform — Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, NFTs. His brand is a single repeated bet: spot the consumer-attention shift, go all in, mock the skeptics later.
“The tractor of our time”
AI slots neatly into that playbook. As early as December 2022 he tweeted that ChatGPT was “finally giving people the ‘aha’ around ai,” and a May 2023 essay compared AI resistance to farmers who feared the tractor — a technology that “made the human life easy and created jobs around it.” He tells creatives that AI disrupts the commodity of execution, not ideation, so order-takers are in trouble and idea-havers have time.
By 2025 he was operationalizing it: Fortune reported he uses ChatGPT as a “strategy thinker” (consulting it on whether the clean-shaven Friends-era look could return as a trend), expects VaynerX employees to automate aggressively, and tells the fearful to learn a new skill rather than “hang around and drink beers and complain about it.” Through 2026 he has framed AI as “the biggest financial opportunity” for people under 25 — the internet-era land grab, repeated.
Critics note he said much the same about NFTs, whose market collapsed. Vaynerchuk’s counter is consistency itself: he claims a decades-long record on attention shifts, and treats AI as the biggest one yet.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/gary-vaynerchuk