I Thought AI Ended My Career at 50. I Was Wrong. Tom Elliott - Ep 36

What happens when the skills you spent decades building suddenly feel obsolete?

In this episode of Builder Stories, Tom Elliott shares the moment AI forced him to confront a terrifying truth. At 50 years old, after spending over a decade building a successful software consulting business, he watched an AI demo that made him physically ill. The machine could do most of what he had built his career on, faster and better.

What followed was not retreat, but reinvention.

Tom walks through the fear, the identity shock, and the decision to either master AI or walk away from knowledge work entirely. He explains how a single month of intense curiosity and hands-on learning flipped his mindset from panic to possibility, and how he went from marketing leader to building agents, voice AI, and production workflows without a traditional engineering background.

This is not a story about hype or shortcuts. It is a story about relevance, agency, and what it really takes to reinvent yourself in the age of AI.

If you have ever wondered whether you are falling behind, or whether it is too late to adapt, this conversation will feel uncomfortably familiar and deeply hopeful.

Learn more and connect with Tom Elliott:

1. Connect with Tom on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomelliottnh/
2. Learn more about Nutum: https://nutum.ai/