AI is getting cheaper and more evenly distributed every month, every week. We're moving toward a world where almost everyone has the equivalent of a small company of capable people working for them on whatever they want. Everybody levels up, but the foundational differences between people stay the same. A nation with infinite resources still reflects its leadership. A company still reflects whoever is directing it. A person with infinite (relative to today) intelligence at their fingertips still reflects that person.
LLMs trend toward the most common path, the average architecture, the average aesthetic. A person with bad taste and unlimited execution gets more bad-taste execution, faster. A company with confused priorities and powerful automation gets automated confusion at scale. These systems can build anything, but the human is always limited by what they know to ask for. Someone might need a decision tree in their workflow and not know that decision trees exist. The system could always build it, they just couldn't see it. And even if they prompt the system to ask them questions, they'll have to make choices at each decision point. Each choice will trend toward the most common path unless the person knows enough to push it somewhere else.
Prompting is a mechanical skill. It's worth having. The thing that actually matters is having enough breadth and instinct to notice the better shape of the work: knowing when a workflow should be a button instead of a chatbot, knowing when an agent needs rails, knowing when the answer is a smaller change closer to the work rather than more software. These systems can go down any path. The person directing them determines which one.
For a consulting firm, this is where the work lives right now. A client doesn't just need someone who can build the thing. They need someone who knows what the thing should be, who can spec it deeply enough that execution actually goes somewhere useful. The work is helping clients develop the taste and specificity to aim well, helping them see what's even possible so they can ask for the right thing.
AI won't always trend toward average. Over time, it will become fully personalized, fully adapted to the individual, an extension of expressing yourself rather than a generic tool you push in a direction. When that happens, differentiation isn't something you have to fight for by knowing more or having better taste. It's automatic. The output just is you, expressed through the system.
The scarce thing becomes the person themselves. The weird bundle of preferences, standards, memories, and obsessions that makes one person choose differently than another. As skill barriers fully lower, the economy gets more pure, almost a direct exchange between one person's essence and another's, less mediated by who can afford the team or who happened to learn the right mechanical skill at the right time. Being a better economic actor starts to look like being a better person.