The Being Economy

For most of modern working life, we have made money in two ways.

From what we know.

And from what we can do.

Learn something valuable. Become good at something difficult. Build experience. Develop expertise. Then find someone willing to pay you for it.

That was a pretty decent deal.

Until we started building machines that know almost everything and are learning to do almost everything.

And we gave everyone access to them for twenty bucks a month.

Oops.

The Knowing Economy

For a long time, knowledge was scarce.

If you wanted legal knowledge, you went to a lawyer.

Financial knowledge? An accountant.

Marketing knowledge? A marketer.

Strategy? A consultant.

You paid people partly because they had spent years accumulating knowledge you didn't have.

Education itself was built around this scarcity.

Go to school.

Acquire knowledge.

Get credentials proving you acquired the knowledge.

Exchange that knowledge for money.

Knowledge created economic value because knowledge was difficult to acquire.

Artificial intelligence is destroying that scarcity at extraordinary speed.

Not knowledge itself.

The scarcity of knowledge.

That's an important distinction.

Expertise still matters. Experience still matters. Understanding still matters.

But access to an enormous amount of human knowledge is becoming almost free.

I can ask AI about marketing, finance, psychology, logistics, manufacturing, programming, business models, contracts or how the hell my washing machine works.

It doesn't mean the answer will always be right.

But neither was the consultant.

The difference is that the consultant charged me $300 an hour.

So if your economic value comes primarily from knowing things other people don't know, I would pay attention.

Your moat is getting shallower.

Fast.

Then there is doing

Fine.

Maybe knowledge becomes abundant.

At least people still need someone to actually do the work.

For now.

AI agents are already moving artificial intelligence from answering questions to executing tasks.

Writing.

Researching.

Coding.

Analyzing.

Creating.

Prospecting.

Responding.

Organizing.

Operating software.

Making decisions within defined boundaries.

We are moving from machines that tell us how to do something to machines that increasingly just do it.

And this won't stop with knowledge workers sitting behind laptops.

Robotics and physical automation will continue pushing the same economics into physical work.

Again, this doesn't mean humans suddenly stop doing things.

That's too simplistic.

It means execution also becomes more abundant.

And economics has a funny habit.

When something becomes abundant, we tend to pay less of a premium for it.

Which creates an interesting problem.

If what you know becomes abundant...

And what you can do becomes increasingly abundant...

What exactly are people going to pay you for?

That question has been bothering me.

Especially because I'm an entrepreneur.

And I work with entrepreneurs.

Maybe we're entering the Being Economy

I think economic value may be starting to migrate again.

From knowing.

To doing.

To being.

And no, I'm not about to tell you to discover your inner light, journal at sunrise and become your authentic self while drinking mushroom coffee.

I'm talking about economics.

What remains scarce when everybody has access to extraordinary knowledge and extraordinary capability?

You do.

Your judgment.

Your reputation.

Your agency.

Your empathy.

Your relationships.

Your taste.

Your character.

Your lived experience.

Your ability to make a decision when there are 100 perfectly reasonable options sitting on the screen.

Your willingness to say:

This one.

And then put your name behind it.

That last part matters.

AI can generate 100 strategies.

Someone still has to decide which one deserves to exist.

AI can recommend a difficult conversation.

Someone still has to have it.

AI can produce an answer.

Someone still has to take responsibility for what happens next.

That's not simply knowledge.

That's not simply execution.

That's human judgment and accountability.

That's being.

Entrepreneurs should pay particular attention

Because entrepreneurs have something employees have traditionally been able to hide behind.

A company.

People bought IBM.

They hired Deloitte.

They banked with HSBC.

The institution carried much of the trust.

But smaller businesses, consultants, freelancers, creators and founder-led companies work differently.

People increasingly want to know:

Who is behind this?

Do I trust them?

Do I believe them?

Do I like the way they think?

Have they actually lived any of this?

Will they tell me something I don't want to hear?

Will they still be there when something goes wrong?

Do I want to work with this person?

Those questions become more important when ten competitors can use essentially the same AI tools to produce essentially the same level of technical output.

Your competitor can buy the same AI you can.

They can automate the same processes.

Build a decent website.

Generate content.

Research the market.

Create proposals.

Build software.

Run campaigns.

So can you.

Congratulations.

We're all special now.

Which means none of that, by itself, makes you particularly special.

Your business still needs architecture

I don't want to swing the pendulum into another stupid extreme.

The mechanics still matter.

You still need a real offer.

A customer.

A viable economic model.

Distribution.

Marketing.

Sales.

Operations.

Delivery.

Systems.

Technology.

Execution.

A charming personality attached to a shit business is still a shit business.

Business Architecture doesn't disappear because artificial intelligence exists.

Quite the opposite.

When execution gets easier, deciding what deserves to be executed becomes even more important.

But I think another layer is becoming harder to ignore.

The human behind the architecture.

Your reputation becomes an asset.

Your network becomes infrastructure.

Your relationships become distribution.

Your point of view becomes differentiation.

Your judgment becomes part of the product.

Your community becomes a moat.

And trust becomes something competitors cannot simply generate with another prompt.

This is one reason I've been thinking much more seriously about networking and community lately.

Not as the awkward business-card-exchanging ritual we've somehow called networking for decades.

Real relationships.

People knowing what you stand for.

People seeing how you think.

People knowing what you build.

People trusting your judgment before they ever need what you're selling.

That takes time.

Which is precisely why it has value.

There is a catch

AI will imitate this too.

It can already sound empathetic.

It can imitate personality.

It can manufacture a personal brand.

It can produce opinions.

It can write a touching LinkedIn story about your courageous journey through adversity before breakfast.

God help us.

So simply having a "personality" isn't the answer.

Manufactured authenticity will become abundant too.

The real scarcity is harder to fake.

A reputation accumulated over years.

Relationships built through actual interaction.

Judgment tested against reality.

Promises kept.

Mistakes owned.

People helped when there was nothing to sell them.

A body of work with your fingerprints on it.

A network of people willing to say:

I know this person. I trust this person.

AI can help you communicate who you are.

It cannot retroactively live your life for you.

So perhaps we're learning the wrong lesson

Everywhere I look, people are scrambling to learn AI.

Learn the tools.

Learn prompting.

Learn automation.

Learn AI agents.

Learn the next platform before the platform they learned last Tuesday becomes obsolete.

Learn. Learn. Learn.

And yes, learn AI.

You absolutely should.

Use it.

Let it make you faster.

Let it make you smarter.

Let it give you capabilities you couldn't afford five years ago.

But understand the paradox:

AI can make you dramatically more capable while simultaneously making capability less differentiating.

That's the part I think we're missing.

So maybe we should spend some of our energy developing something else too.

Our judgment.

Our relationships.

Our reputation.

Our ability to communicate.

Our empathy.

Our courage to have a point of view.

Our ability to build trust.

Our ability to bring people together.

Our willingness to stand behind our decisions.

Not because these things sound nice.

Because they may become economically more valuable as everything around them becomes easier to reproduce.

For entrepreneurs, I think this needs to become part of how we architect businesses in the age of AI.

Don't only architect the product.

Don't only architect the systems.

Don't only architect the technology, marketing and sales.

Architect the human layer too.

Because the future may not belong to the person who knows the most.

AI ruined that game.

It may not belong to the person who can do the most either.

AI agents, automation and robotics are coming for that game too.

It may increasingly belong to the person people choose.

Choose to trust.

Choose to follow.

Choose to buy from.

Choose to recommend.

Choose to work with.

Choose to build with.

Knowledge can be copied.

Capability can be automated.

But there is still only one you.

The question is whether you've made that you worth choosing.