The New Economics Of Expertise

What is the actual value of expertise?

Or, said another way, if AI can now do even some of the work of senior executives with advanced degrees and tons of tread on their respective tires, where does the value shift? If work expertise becomes common and accessible, does that mean knowledge is not as valuable? I’m grappling here… are you? This week on Thinking With Mitch Joel, I had a fascinating conversation with Sangeet Paul Choudary about his new book, Reshuffle (he’s also CEO of Platform Thinking Labs and the author of Platform Revolution). Sangeet made an observation that has been boiling my noodle. He was talking about London cab drivers and how, before GPS, navigating the city was a highly specialized skill. Years of experience, deep knowledge and hard-earned expertise. Then GPS arrived… then maps on every phone. The drivers didn’t suddenly become less knowledgeable. The skill didn’t disappear… but the value of the skill did.

What if that’s a much more useful way to think about what AI is actually doing?

Most of the public discourse still sounds like science fiction. Will AI replace workers? Will AI take jobs? Will AI automate entire professions? Maybe… maybe not. But there is another possible future that feels far more immediate. The knowledge itself remains valuable but the ability to access it becomes commonplace. For most of my career, expertise functioned like scarcity. If you knew something others didn’t know… if you could connect ideas in a unique way… if you had accumulated experience that took years to develop… there was economic value attached to that. Organizations paid for it… clients paid for it and markets rewarded it.

Does AI change that equation?

Not because it possesses wisdom. Not because it understands context the way humans do. But because it dramatically lowers the cost of accessing certain forms of knowledge and capability. What was once difficult becomes easier. What was once scarce becomes abundant. And when scarcity disappears, value moves. I was speaking at an event this week and an attendee stated (quite adamantly) that lawyers are cooked. As if it is written in stone (or in an LLM). What if all of this AI that is supposedly going to replace lawyers actually allows lawyers to spend less time drafting contracts, responding to emails and managing administrative work… and more time practicing law? More time building relationships, exercising judgment, developing strategy and acting as true counsel to their clients?

We’ve seen this movie before.

Many professionals are still approaching AI as if the goal is to protect the thing they do… day in and day out. The challenge may actually be understanding where value migrates once everyone has access to similar capabilities. The internet made information abundant. Social media made publishing abundant. Smartphones made photography abundant. None of those technologies eliminated value… they simply shifted where value lives. That’s the part that often gets missed in these conversations. When everyone could take photographs, taste became scarce. If AI makes certain forms of expertise widely available, the premium may move elsewhere. “Elsewhere” might be trust, judgment, decision-making, creativity, better questions, different perspectives or opportunities that aren’t obvious from the data alone.

Value migration seems like a more reasonable story.

Because history suggests that technology rarely destroys value… it just forces us to reconsider where it lives. So, this debate we keep having about whether AI is intelligent enough, capable enough or accurate enough may be distracting us from something much bigger: the market is already starting to re-price what knowledge is worth. The skill didn’t go away. The expertise didn’t disappear. The value simply moved.

And the real trick will be figuring out where it’s moving next.

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