“When cheap, scalable output becomes abundant, experience, relationships, proof and genuine effort become the differentiators.”
I wrote that recently because I think it sums up quite nicely what is happening in business at the moment.
AI has changed the economics of creating things.
Emails. Articles. Websites. Proposals. Presentations. Images. Videos. Social media posts. Product descriptions. Sales sequences. Reports. Research summaries.
Things that once required several people, several hours or sometimes several days can now be produced in minutes.
And that is genuinely useful.
I use AI myself. I build automation. I work with technology every day. I am certainly not going to pretend that businesses should ignore it or somehow turn the clock backwards.
That would be ridiculous.
But there is another side to this which I think businesses need to understand.
When something becomes incredibly easy to produce, simply producing more of it stops being much of an advantage.
We have made output cheap
For years, one of the constraints in business was simply the amount of work people could physically produce.
There were only so many emails a salesperson could write.
Only so many articles a marketing department could publish.
Only so many proposals a company could prepare.
Only so many graphics a designer could produce.
Only so much research somebody could reasonably carry out during the working day.
That limitation has largely disappeared.
Give somebody the right tools and they can now produce hundreds of personalised emails, dozens of articles, a month’s worth of social posts and several sales proposals before lunch.
Technically, that sounds fantastic.
Commercially, however, it creates another problem.
Everybody else can do exactly the same thing.
And they are.
That means the internet is rapidly filling up with more content, more emails, more offers, more adverts and more outreach than any normal person could possibly consume.
The result is fairly predictable.
People switch off.
I know I do.
I receive emails every day that are clearly AI-generated or automated. Some of them are technically quite good.
Correct spelling.
Reasonable grammar.
My name is in the right place.
The company name is correct.
Sometimes they even mention something from our website.
Ten years ago that level of personalisation might have caught my attention.
Today it barely registers.
Because I know how easy it is to produce.
That is the important part.
The value of something changes when people understand how easy it is to create
This isn’t particularly new.
Whenever technology makes something easier to produce, the market eventually stops rewarding the production itself.
Website development is a good example.
Years ago, simply having a professional website could differentiate a business.
Today practically anybody can build one.
You can use WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix or any number of AI website builders and have something presentable online very quickly.
So the question is no longer:
Can you build a website?
The question becomes:
Can you build a website that actually does something useful for the business?
Does it generate enquiries?
Does it rank?
Does it explain the offer properly?
Does it build trust?
Does it convert visitors into customers?
Does it integrate into the company’s processes?
The technical production became cheaper.
The thinking became more valuable.
AI is doing exactly the same thing to a much wider range of work.
Content itself is becoming a commodity
There is already far more content being produced than anybody needs.
And I think we are going to see an enormous amount more.
Companies are being told they need to publish constantly.
Post every day.
Email customers every week.
Write blogs.
Produce videos.
Send newsletters.
Build funnels.
Create lead magnets.
Automate LinkedIn.
Automate sales outreach.
Automate follow-ups.
Automate the automation.
At some point you have to ask a fairly obvious question.
Who is supposed to consume all of this?
There are still only 24 hours in somebody’s day.
AI might allow companies to produce ten times as much marketing, but it hasn’t given customers ten times as much attention.
If anything, attention is becoming harder to obtain.
That completely changes what businesses should be concentrating on.
Producing another 50 pieces of mediocre content isn’t necessarily the answer.
Producing something worth somebody’s time probably is.
Experience becomes more valuable
One thing AI can reproduce very easily is information.
What it cannot magically give somebody is twenty years of actual experience.
There is a difference between knowing something and having dealt with it.
I work with technology and hardware. There are plenty of situations where you can read every specification sheet in the world and still not understand how a product will behave once it gets into a particular environment.
That comes from experience.
Knowing which questions to ask.
Knowing what usually goes wrong.
Knowing which specifications matter and which ones are largely marketing.
Knowing when a customer is asking for the wrong product.
Knowing when something that looks cheaper will actually cost more in the long run.
That knowledge has always been valuable.
I think it becomes even more valuable in an AI-heavy world.
Because information is becoming abundant.
Judgement isn’t.
Relationships become more valuable
Business has always been built on relationships, despite decades of people trying to invent software that supposedly eliminates the need for them.
Customers still prefer dealing with people they trust.
Suppliers still look after customers they have good relationships with.
People still recommend businesses that have treated them properly.
And when something goes wrong, customers don’t want to have a conversation with a perfectly optimised chatbot.
They want somebody to sort the problem out.
That doesn’t mean every interaction needs to be manual.
Far from it.
Automation should deal with the repetitive work.
Systems should deal with administration.
AI should help people work faster.
But the purpose of that technology should be to give people more time for the interactions that actually matter, not eliminate every human interaction possible.
There is a strange obsession at the moment with removing people from businesses.
I think the better businesses will do the opposite.
They will use technology to remove unnecessary work from their people so those people can spend more time with customers.
There is a big difference.
Proof becomes more valuable
Anybody can claim anything online.
That’s another problem AI is accelerating.
Everyone is suddenly an expert.
Every company is apparently “industry-leading”.
Every new business is “revolutionising” something.
Every agency has a “proven framework”.
Every consultant has supposedly generated millions for somebody.
Every product is groundbreaking.
Most customers have heard it all before.
Which means claims are becoming less valuable.
Proof is becoming more valuable.
Show me the customer.
Show me the project.
Show me the product working.
Show me the case study.
Show me the numbers.
Show me what happened when something went wrong.
Show me what you have actually done.
I think businesses will increasingly need to move away from saying:
“We can do this.”
And towards demonstrating:
“Here is where we have done it.”
That is much harder to fake consistently.
And that is exactly why it carries more weight.
Genuine effort becomes obvious
This one interests me the most.
People can tell when somebody has made an effort.
Maybe not immediately, but they can tell.
You can send somebody an AI-generated email that has scraped their LinkedIn profile, mentioned their latest post and inserted their company name in six different places.
Technically, it is personalised.
But it doesn’t necessarily feel personal.
Compare that with somebody who has genuinely looked at your business, understood what you do, spotted a problem and written three paragraphs explaining something useful.
You notice the difference.
One took a machine thirty seconds.
The other took somebody twenty minutes.
Ironically, as automation becomes more widespread, those twenty minutes become more valuable.
Because effort itself becomes scarce.
The handwritten note starts standing out again.
The proper telephone call stands out.
The person who remembers what you discussed six months ago stands out.
The supplier who rings because they spotted a potential problem before shipping your order stands out.
The company that actually answers the phone stands out.
None of these things are particularly revolutionary.
That is rather the point.
AI does not remove the need to be good at what you do
There is a slightly dangerous idea floating around that AI somehow allows businesses to skip the difficult part.
You don’t need to understand marketing because AI can write your marketing.
You don’t need to understand coding because AI can generate code.
You don’t need to understand sales because AI can automate your outreach.
You don’t need to understand your product because AI can answer customers’ questions.
I don’t believe that works for very long.
AI can massively increase the output of somebody who knows what they are doing.
It can also massively increase the output of somebody who doesn’t.
The second person simply produces bad work much faster.
That is not necessarily progress.
The strongest use of AI, in my view, is not replacing expertise.
It is amplifying expertise.
Give an experienced engineer better research tools and they become more productive.
Give a good salesperson better information and automation and they can spend more time selling.
Give a good marketer AI and they can test ideas faster.
Give a good business owner better systems and they can operate with less administration.
The expertise still matters.
Possibly more than before.
Businesses are going to have to prove there are real people behind them
I think this will become increasingly important over the next few years.
Customers are going to become more suspicious of businesses that look completely automated.
Perfect stock photography.
Perfect AI copy.
Perfect chatbot.
Twenty articles published every week.
Five social posts a day.
Automated email sequences.
Automated LinkedIn messages.
Automated sales calls.
At some point somebody asks:
Who actually works here?
That is why I think companies should be showing more of the real business.
The people.
The workshop.
The mistakes.
The projects.
The installations.
The products.
The customers.
The opinions.
The experience.
The things that don’t always look perfectly polished.
For years marketing encouraged businesses to present themselves as bigger and more polished than they really were.
AI makes that incredibly easy.
Which is precisely why being obviously real may become a competitive advantage.
The businesses that win won’t necessarily use less AI
This is an important distinction.
I don’t think the answer is to reject AI.
Quite the opposite.
The smartest companies will probably use an enormous amount of it.
They will automate administration.
They will automate repetitive communication.
They will use AI for research.
They will use it to analyse information.
They will use it to assist customer service.
They will use it to develop software.
They will use it to produce first drafts.
They will use it to improve internal processes.
But customers shouldn’t necessarily feel like they are dealing with an automated factory.
Technology should be working behind the business, not replacing the business.
That is where I think some companies are getting it wrong.
They are using AI to increase the volume of mediocre interactions instead of using AI to create more time for meaningful ones.
Scarcity hasn’t disappeared. It has moved.
That is really the point behind my original quote.
Technology doesn’t eliminate scarcity.
It changes what is scarce.
When information was difficult to obtain, information was valuable.
Google made information much easier to find.
Then organising and interpreting information became more important.
Social media made publishing easy.
Then gaining attention became more important.
AI is making production easy.
So the value is moving again.
Towards things that machines cannot mass-produce cheaply.
Experience.
Real experience takes years.
Relationships.
Real relationships take time.
Proof.
Proof requires actually doing the work.
Reputation.
Reputation is built through repeated behaviour.
Judgement.
Judgement comes from making decisions and living with the consequences.
Genuine effort.
Effort costs something.
And because those things are harder to manufacture, they become more valuable.
The opportunity for small businesses
There is actually some very good news in all of this, particularly for smaller businesses.
A small company cannot necessarily outspend a multinational.
It cannot employ hundreds of marketers.
It cannot dominate every advertising channel.
But it can be more human.
It can know its customers.
It can answer the telephone.
It can make decisions quickly.
It can solve unusual problems.
It can build genuine relationships.
It can develop real specialist knowledge.
And AI now gives those smaller companies access to capabilities that previously required much larger teams.
That combination is incredibly powerful.
Use technology to gain the efficiency of a larger organisation while keeping the responsiveness and personal relationships of a smaller one.
That, to me, is far more interesting than simply using AI to generate another thousand emails.
We may be entering the proof economy
For years the internet rewarded visibility.
Then it rewarded content.
Then it rewarded engagement.
I think we may now be moving towards something closer to a proof economy.
Not:
“Look how much content we produce.”
But:
“Look what we actually do.”
Not:
“Look how clever our marketing is.”
But:
“Speak to our customers.”
Not:
“We are experts.”
But:
“Here is twenty years of work.”
Not:
“We care about customer service.”
But:
“Here is what happened when a customer had a problem at 4pm on a Friday.”
That is much harder to automate.
Which is exactly why it matters.
Cheap output changes what customers value
There is nothing inherently wrong with cheap, scalable output.
It is one of the great advantages of technology.
Businesses should absolutely take advantage of it.
But once everybody has access to the same capability, it stops being the differentiator.
Having AI will not differentiate your company.
Using AI will not differentiate your company.
Producing huge amounts of content with AI certainly won’t differentiate your company.
Eventually almost everybody will be doing those things.
The differentiation comes from what sits underneath it.
Your knowledge.
Your judgement.
Your reputation.
Your relationships.
Your track record.
Your willingness to put some effort in when everybody else is looking for the shortest possible route.
Which brings me back to the original point:
“When cheap, scalable output becomes abundant, experience, relationships, proof and genuine effort become the differentiators.”
AI is making many things cheaper.
It is making many things faster.
And it is making many things easier.
But easy things rarely remain valuable for very long.
The opportunity therefore isn’t simply to produce more.
It is to use the technology to free yourself up to do more of the things that are still difficult.
Because those are increasingly the things customers are going to notice.