Mike Partners launches a Netflix-style learning platform as AI accelerates job displacement and traditional education struggles to keep up
By Visionary School Staff
Jobs are disappearing faster than most people want to admit. Across industries, AI is quietly taking over work that once took years of training to do well. We sat down with Mike Partners, CEO of Visionary School, to hear why he thinks the education system hasn’t caught up with that reality, and what he’s doing about it.
Let’s start with the big picture. How serious is the threat that AI poses to the workforce right now?
“It’s not a future problem. It’s happening right now. We’re watching entire job categories get compressed or eliminated in real time. Customer service, data entry, paralegal work, basic accounting, logistics coordination. These are fields that employed millions of people, and AI is doing significant portions of that work today. It’s only going to accelerate from here.”
And you think traditional education has failed to acknowledge that?
“Yeah, pretty much. The system was built to produce employees. The whole structure of it: sit in rows, follow instructions, pass tests, get certified, go fill a role. But the demand for that kind of worker is shrinking faster than the education sector wants to admit. We’re charging people tens of thousands of dollars to train them for positions that AI is already doing. And nobody wants to say it out loud.”
So what’s the alternative? What is Visionary School actually building?
“We’re building something that works like Netflix, but for entrepreneurship education. On-demand, subscription-based content that teaches people how to actually build something: how to identify a market, validate an idea, build a brand, manage money, sell, scale. No lectures on a fixed schedule. No student debt. Just practical knowledge you can get into whenever you’re ready.”
Why entrepreneurship specifically? Why not just teach people new technical skills to compete alongside AI?
“Because the technical skills will also get automated. You can retrain someone to code today, and in five years AI will write better code faster than they can. What AI can’t replicate is the drive to create something from nothing, to take a risk on your own idea, to build a relationship, to figure out a problem nobody’s handed you a spec for. That’s entrepreneurship. That’s what’s left when you strip away everything that can be automated.”
Who is Visionary School designed for?
“Anyone who’s ever felt like the traditional path wasn’t built for them, or who’s realized it’s stopped working. That could be a 22-year-old who just graduated and can’t find work in their field. It could be a 45-year-old whose job just got automated away. It could be someone who never went to university and always felt locked out because of it. We want this to be something anyone can get into, not just people who can already afford to take risks.”
What would you say to someone skeptical of this, someone who still thinks traditional education has value?
“I’m not against education. I’m against pretending nothing has changed. There are fields where formal training is genuinely necessary: medicine, engineering, law. But for a large chunk of the workforce, a degree has become a very expensive piece of paper. The world is moving faster than any accreditation committee can keep up with. We built Visionary School to move at the pace of the market instead.”
Visionary School is set to launch with a growing library of entrepreneurship content, with new material added regularly. Mike Partners says pricing will be kept low by design. The goal, he says, is to make it something anyone can walk into, not just people who already have a financial cushion to fall back on.
His closing thought is simple: “Stop training people to be replaced. Start teaching them to build.”
