AI Made Your Expertise Cheap. Now What?

Imagine you're a business owner right now, sitting here watching AI dramatically change the landscape, and you have no clue what it's doing to your business. You know an effect is happening. You can't fully predict what the full effect will be over the next year, two years, five years. But you know that everything is changing and nothing is staying the same.

So you're left with: what do we do now?

And when you sit in that space long enough, you get close to realizing something. You have to make a bet.

Making a bet is hard because the potential to lose money is real. Every time you make a bet, you're putting money on red or money on black. You're picking your favorite number and hoping to God it hits. There is no sense that you know for certain the bet will pay off.

It's as risky as any kind of investment, except investments usually give you a lot more control. You control who you're investing in, how much you're investing, when you get out. When you're making a bet, it feels like you're just putting money on a table and hoping. There's a lot less work you get to do.

Now, in Vegas, the odds are stacked against you. I'm not saying every bet you make for your business is that precarious. But it feels that way right now. It feels like we don't really know what's going to happen. AI is changing everything.

What Used to Separate You

You're a service business. You deliver value to others and you charge a price for it. And the hallmark of your business has always been the same: you're the expert. You know things other people don't know. Whether you're an accountant, a tax attorney, a mechanic, a chiropractor, a dentist, a judo instructor, you know things other people don't. And you go deep. That has been the single dynamic that allowed you to generate the income you have.

On top of that, in many cases, your expertise comes with an investment in equipment. If you're a dentist, you have an X-ray machine. If you're a software developer, you have fast computers and access to cloud services and APIs. If you're a chiropractor, you have tables, and those tables aren't cheap. You can't just decide you want a massage table for your house and not discover, oh, these are investments.

You make money because of your domain expertise, and you reinvest portions of that money to buy the equipment, the gear. If you're a photographer, your cameras are more expensive, your flash, your lighting kits. Everything is more expensive than what the regular consumer has access to.

Domain expertise plus investment in assets. Those two things were supposed to separate you from an everyday person doing their own thing.

But I mentioned photography for a reason. The prosumer camera gutted industries. Gutted jobs. You don't have portrait studios and wedding photographers in the same quantity today as you did before. Think of the number of weddings you've attended in the last ten years where they put little instant cameras on the tables, or gave you a URL to upload your own iPhone photos. That changed the entire picture.

Innovation changes landscapes. And those who get innovated over, those standing in the middle of the road when the innovation comes running through, often don't have a lot of choice about whether they survive. Unless they make that bet. The bet that says you're going to move in a different direction, one that keeps you out of the commoditization of the thing you used to generate income from.

When Taco Bell Comes for You

Imagine you've been offering people meals. That's your thing. I'm not saying it takes tons of expertise or tons of investment. I just want a simple example we can all get our heads around.

And now Taco Bell is coming for you.

You may think, Taco Bell is horrible food compared to what I offer. Yeah. That's why I picked it. Because if Taco Bell is coming for you, they're coming at a very different price point. Say the average meal you prepare is a fifty dollar meal, and Taco Bell shows up saying, we have a full plate of food for ten bucks.

You would have to go: okay, what are we gonna do?

Move One: Elevate Value

Some of you would choose to elevate. You'd say, what I'm going to do is make a better, healthier, fancier meal, and I'm going to present it and say: look at the difference between my plated meal and that burrito wrapped in paper, sitting next to fries they now call nacho fries with a little dip of cheese. Look at the difference. You're gonna get what you pay for.

To the consumer who values that premium, it's a winning play. You're going to have fewer customers. But you're going to have more discerning customers, which means they're not gonna jump ship every time Taco Bell comes out with a new Crunchwrap Supreme.

That's one move: up the value chain on differentiation.

Move Two: Go Volume

Others of you may decide to go volume. Say you're not charging fifty dollars per meal. You're charging ten, and Taco Bell is coming at you at ten. What you do is say: because we buy ingredients in bulk, and because we serve a lot of customers in our metropolitan area, we can put more food in front of you for ten dollars than Taco Bell can.

Because Taco Bell is not intent on feeding you for ten dollars. Taco Bell is intent on taking ten dollars for a two dollar meal. They are in the profit maximization business. We are in the customer satisfaction business. Look at what you get for ten dollars over there: two items. Look at what we give you: five.

Smashburger at one point did something like all-you-can-eat burgers for a set amount, and you're like, that's bananas, who wants to eat that many burgers? But it's a volume game. You're not trying to distinguish on a premium offering. You're doing it on volume, on satisfaction, on showing customers you're here for them.

That's another bet. A different bet.

Move Three: Shift to Equipping

Now there's a third move you could make. It's the one where you say: we have been dietitians this whole time. Yes, we make food, we assemble food. But the deep thinking that goes into food is what actually matters.

So here's what we're going to do. You come in, we interview you, we do blood work, we get your medical records. We understand what nutrients you need, what you're allergic to, what your overall health and goals are. And from there, we create menus and recipes and hand them back to you.

We are no longer going to assemble the food. You're self-service now. You come in, pay the sitting fee, pay for the blood work, and we give you the menus. Once a quarter you come back for another session and we give you new ones.

It's a very different game. The chief value proposition is the self-service model. They take care of themselves. But you provided the thing you had, the thing they still didn't have: your domain expertise. You've shifted into the equipping game.

And Then AI Made Expertise Cheap

So here's what happened in the AI world.

Domain expertise, the thing that used to be the barrier for everybody else, became really, really cheap. And fast.

We saw a little of this with YouTube. People were suddenly doing things they'd never done before because, oh, I just watched a video on YouTube. Now you go to ChatGPT or Claude, ask it a question, and it gives you an answer that sounds completely legitimate. I'm not saying every answer is accurate. But it's read more on the topic than you have. That's for sure. Maybe not more than every expert out there, but way more than the consumer has. So it produces an answer that makes you go: that's credible. That's intelligent.

It gets even more ambiguous when you're an expert in something with a high degree of taste attached to it. Say you're a brand specialist, a graphic designer, a software architect, where the chief expertise comes from having done something a hundred times, a thousand times. You've landed on the best practices because you went through all the work to figure them out.

The previous logic was: I'm not worried about a competitor who just got into the market, because they're five years behind me, ten years behind me. They're not going to catch up.

But if that junior practitioner can go to an AI model, ask some questions, and immediately skip to the front of the line? They knew how to do things. They just didn't know what to do. And now the AI has told them: skip these mistakes, do this instead. All of a sudden your differentiator, your expertise, has been eroded dramatically. They can do it faster and potentially cheaper. They haven't made the same investments in equipment. So they put out a shingle that says "I build websites for fifty dollars" while someone else is sitting there saying "I build websites for a hundred thousand dollars."

I'm not saying the hundred thousand dollar website is dead. I'm saying there may only be a handful of those available in the market per year. Which means all the thousands of agencies are now competing for six chances instead of six hundred chances.

The Part of the Bet You Control

Now here's what I want you to notice about all three of those moves.

If you go premium, your whole play depends on finding the discerning customer, the one who values the plated meal over the paper-wrapped burrito. If you go volume, your whole play depends on reaching a lot of customers, because volume without traffic is just inventory. And if you shift to equipping, your whole play depends on finding the people who want to be equipped, who will pay for the sitting fee and the blood work because they believe in what you know.

Three different bets. One shared dependency. Every single one of them lives or dies on lead acquisition.

And this is where the story flips. Because the same AI that made your expertise cheap? It's also the most powerful demand generation engine you've ever had access to.

The AI that lets a junior practitioner skip to the front of the line also lets you understand your audience at a depth you never had time for. It lets you produce the content that reaches them, in their language, tuned to what they actually care about. It lets you segment, personalize, follow up, and qualify at a scale that used to require a marketing department you couldn't afford.

You don't get to control whether AI changes your landscape. That part of the bet was placed for you. But you do get to control whether you use it to fill the top of your funnel while you make your move.

So make your bet. Go premium, go volume, go equipping. But whichever direction you pick, don't leave the one tool that's disrupting you sitting on the table. Point it at the problem every bet shares: getting the next customer to show up.