When Everyone's an Expert: Rethinking Strategy in the AI Era
In a new Harvard Business Review article, my co-authors and I explore a crucial question: What happens to business strategy when AI makes expertise abundant?
Consider this fundamental truth: businesses are essentially bundles of expertise organized to solve specific problems. Your local doctor's office combines medical knowledge with practice management skills. Software companies blend engineering expertise with marketing, sales, and operations capabilities.
But AI is rapidly democratizing access to expertise across domains. The implications are profound.
The Triple Product of AI
Our research reveals organizations that effectively deploy AI will benefit from what we call the "triple product":
Operational Efficiency: AI transforms business processes by enabling task-level expertise outsourcing. Early evidence is striking - developers using AI complete tasks 20-55% faster, call center reps resolve 14% more issues per hour.
Workforce Enhancement: AI acts as a great equalizer, elevating baseline performance across organizations. In our BCG study, AI-augmented consultants completed 12% more tasks 25% faster. More importantly, it boosted lower-skilled workers' performance by 43%.
Strategic Focus: Companies can concentrate resources on truly differentiating capabilities while leveraging AI for everything else. Consider FocusFuel, which used AI across its value chain to launch and scale rapidly while focusing human expertise on product strategy and customer relationships.
The Strategic Imperative
But here's the challenge: if AI makes expertise more accessible, what becomes your competitive moat?
Companies need to ask three critical questions:
Which customer problems will become self-serve through AI?
How must your core expertise evolve to stay ahead of AI capabilities?
What durable competitive advantages (brands, relationships, physical assets) should you build or strengthen?
The Path Forward
The winners in this era won't be those who simply use AI for productivity gains. They'll be organizations that fundamentally rethink how they create and capture value when expertise becomes abundant.
For individual knowledge workers, this means evolving beyond traditional domain expertise. The highest value will come from uniquely human capabilities - creativity, judgment, empathy - combined with AI-augmented technical skills.
The AI revolution isn't just about doing things faster - it's about reimagining what's possible when expertise becomes abundant. The time to start thinking strategically about this shift is now.
Here is the article.
Let me know what you think.