Sponsored by
Welcome to Billion Dollar Energy. I went from a farm town in Canada to a Silicon Valley insider and venture capitalist. I share secrets and insights to help you build wealth, legacy, and freedom.
Forwarded this email? Join 50,000+ other professionals every Wednesday.
Billion Dollar Energy is brought to you by:
The best voice models, now across all channels
Most CX platforms do not own the voice. They orchestrate a workflow, then call a third party for speech and transcription. Every hop adds latency, cost, and another vendor to manage.
ElevenAgents is the opposite. They make the voice models the market builds on, and ElevenAgents puts full orchestration on top. Voice, transcription, text-based chat, and reasoning run in one vertically integrated pipeline, so responses come back in <400 milliseconds and sound human, not synthetic.
Plus, you keep full control. Plug in any LLM, integrate tools, webhooks, and MCP servers, and ground responses in your knowledge base. Get an agent live in minutes, then A/B test with Experiments, enforce Guardrails, and version every change.
The payoff: more human conversations, lower latency, and far less time stitching infrastructure together. You build on the models you already trust. Pricing is transparent and flat at $0.08 per minute.
A lot of my Billion Dollar Energy readers don't know this, but I also write a second newsletter, The Women AI Weekly, built specifically to teach women how to use AI well in their business, their content, and their actual lives. I started it because of one gap I kept running into. Women were adopting AI, but where they pointed it, and how they felt about it once they had it, told a completely different story.
Almost everyone has AI somewhere in their lives, but few are actually going beyond incremental productivity improvements.
The adoption number is genuinely good.
Among women entrepreneurs, AI use jumped from 38% in 2024 to 82% in 2025, according to Cherie Blair Foundation research published this year. Over half use it weekly. More than a third use it daily. This is one of the fastest adoption curves in the small business world.
But almost all of it is sitting in the same three buckets: email drafts, social captions, and customer messages.
Sixty-nine percent of women entrepreneurs report real time savings from AI, and the Foundation's own read on the data is blunt, those gains "are not automatically translating into business growth." Only 33% of frequent users apply AI to operations. Only 35% use it in bookkeeping and finance. The functions that actually decide whether a business survives, pricing, cash flow, hiring, contracts, get the least AI attention, not the most.
The gap in usage is growing.
JPMorgan Chase Institute's analysis of small business payment data found male-owned firms hit 19.7% AI adoption by the end of 2025, versus 17.2% for female-owned firms. That gap has grown every year since 2019, from a nearly negligible difference to one that's now more than eight times as large.
The generational version is worse. Among the youngest business owners, 20% of men-owned firms had adopted AI by 2025, compared to 13.9% of women-owned firms. The women most likely to build AI-native businesses from day one are, statistically, the ones adopting it slowest.
Women see AI’s impact on the world differently.
Pew Research Center's June 2026 survey found chatbot usage has nearly converged: 50% of men and 47% of women now use them, closing an 11-point gap from 2024. But the way men and women weigh AI's impact hasn't converged at all. Sixty-eight percent of women believe AI is advancing too quickly, versus 58% of men. Asked what AI will mean for society, 43% of women expect it to do more harm than good. Only 11% expect it to help. On the other side, 22% of men expect it to help, and 36% expect it to do more harm than good.
That skepticism isn't abstract. Gallup's March 2026 poll found 71% of Americans oppose new data center construction in their area, more than the 53% who oppose a nuclear plant nearby, and women drive that number. Fifty-five percent of women say they strongly oppose data centers, compared with 43% of men. The top reasons cited: water usage, energy consumption, and pollution, the direct physical cost of running the AI systems everyone's being told to adopt.
Put those two data points together and a pattern shows up. Women are adopting AI at a record pace inside their own businesses while staying considerably more skeptical than men about what AI is doing to the world outside their business. Both of those can be rational at the same time: this tool is useful to me right now, and its footprint is a real cost that somebody, often the communities living next to these facilities, is paying for.
It comes down to how AI is used.
PwC's 2026 predictions describe the shift already underway in business: moving from individual employees prompting a chatbot to agentic workflows, AI systems that own an entire process end to end, not just one task inside it. PwC's own framing argues that the technology itself delivers only about 20% of an AI initiative's value. The other 80% comes from redesigning the work around it, deciding what the agent owns, what a person owns, and where the two hand off.
That 80% is exactly what's missing from the email-and-social version of adoption. Drafting a caption faster doesn't redesign anything. Handing your pricing model, your contract review, or your 13-week cash forecast to an agent does.
What I’m doing with this info.
Transformative technology hitting the mainstream is always going to be turbulent. Opinions on both the positive and negative impacts of AI are all valid, but the truth is, we don’t know how things are going to shake out in the next five to ten years. For me, if AI is going to make it easier for me to have a positive impact, staying current is worth the effort. Your mileage may vary.
In the meantime, here are some ways I’ve approached AI adoption in the businesses I’m building.
Audit your AI use by function, not by tool. Mark every place AI already touches your business. If every mark lands in content, comms, or admin, you have adoption without integration.
Pick the bottleneck that costs you money, not the one that's easiest to automate. Content is easy. That's exactly why it's already done. The harder, more valuable targets are the ones that require automation beyond chatting with AI in a chat window.
Measure it in dollars, not hours. "I saved three hours on emails this week" is a good habit. Understand how deeper AI usage can save or even make you money.
Don't let broad skepticism block targeted adoption. Being right to question AI's water use, energy draw, or societal trajectory doesn't mean the specific tool that fixes your cash flow forecasting deserves the same scrutiny as a new data center in your county. Evaluate the two separately.
The gap here isn't really about confidence or skill. Women are adopting AI in record numbers while asking harder, more legitimate questions about what it costs the world to run it. Both are true at once, and the businesses that win will be the ones who let the first answer, yes, use it, decide where they point it, without letting the second, question its cost, stop them from using it well.
Hit reply and tell me: where does AI actually touch your business right now? I read every single response.
Jenny
P.S. If you want weekly lessons, opportunities, events, and news surrounding AI, subscribe to my other newsletter The Women AI Weekly.
Shared this email? Subscribe here.