A reliable business system isn’t valuable only because it improves cash flow; it reduces hyper-vigilance and lets the owner become attentive, curious, and human again.
AI has made expertise easier to imitate—and harder to recognize.
There’s no doubt that the age of AI has made expertise easier to imitate. I fear that we may be entering the age of the imposter, where imposter syndrome gets embedded into the very computer systems that are supposed to be supporting us to give us perspective and ideas and fresh insights.
It’s estimated that 50% of new content is generated by artificial intelligence and distributed by bots, not humans. So even if you are an expert in your field, there’s now increased competition for the eyes, the ears, and the hearts of your audience.
I think that by not being present, by taking the time to create one’s own content and develop one’s own ideas, we take ourselves out of the running. Why should anybody pay attention to us? Is it that we don’t believe enough in ourselves to invest in creating our own reputation?
AI increases the supply of answers, but not the supply of judgment.
AI is fantastic. You can ask it a simple question, and it’ll give you a multi-paragraph, complex answer, but it lacks the judgment of human life experience and insight.
- If you’re using AI as a thinking partner, what do you do with the very verbose answers that it gives you? How do you implement it?
- How do you know what to do next?
Because AI is not sentient, it doesn’t have the context of your life and is really only plagiarizing the knowledge that it’s been trained on. Are most dangerously simply regurgitating what it thinks you want to hear, based upon the nature of your question and your inquiry.
“I can build it” is different from “I know what it needs to accomplish.”
I believe that today, in August 2026, we are in a AI-driven crisis of false competence.
I was speaking with a client recently, and he made the point that a lot of the prospects that he talks to misunderstand websites. AI lets business owners feel capable in areas that they haven’t mastered. They can create abundant information, but demand, trust, judgment, and buying remain human.
As a consultant, I used to excel in giving people perspective. Now perspective isn’t enough. Now I have to help them, as a coach or a consultant, actually accomplish something. In other words, get something done.
Tools create outputs; experts connect those outputs to business outcomes.
Artificial intelligence is a tool that creates and outputs seemingly intelligent answers to questions that are posed. However, it’s a person’s expertise, insights, experiences, and skill sets that allow them to connect those things to business outcomes, and that is uniquely human.
The new role of a consultant isn’t guarding information—it’s helping clients recognize what matters.
I think consultants and coaches are having a moment, kind of like salespeople, kind of like how salespeople’s roles change with the advent of the internet. Access to information was the salesperson’s value-added and relationship-building tool. Bringing information and perspectives and observations from their travels was a crucial part of the business relationship that salesmen have been using for generations, but that all changed when the internet made information widely available.
Now, with the advent of artificial intelligence, AI has given anyone with a computer the opportunity to gather a large amount of information and get it summarized quickly, but that is not expertise. That doesn’t tell you why the information is important. The AI can’t tell you why the information is important. That is a uniquely human trait.
Humility may become a competitive advantage: knowing when capability ends and expertise is needed.
In an age when everyone can generate an answer, the advantage belongs to those humble enough to question the answer.
Being curious, staying curious, asking questions, pursuing a line of inquiry to gain an insight and to understand what may be behind an answer is an incredibly important skill that’s not going to go away any time soon. And I believe the humble coach or business consultant that can stay curious and ask better questions is going to be uniquely qualified and skilled to assist their customers.
The future won’t belong to people who know everything. It will belong to people who know where their knowledge ends.