The nearly universal soul-searching about the impact of AI-driven google-and-paraphrase on the competitiveness of companies and professionals indicates, if nothing else, how much of what we got paid for was just google-and-paraphrase. Emphasis on was. The ability to produce external and internal content showing familiarity with what an industry or market is saying and writing has become exponentially cheaper; sounding like you know what you're talking about suddenly commands a far lower premium for wages and valuations.

So what does?

The straightforward response is that if showing up-to-date knowledge now doesn't even require having up-to-date knowledge — it's enough that an AI has been trained with content about it — then to show something people will pay extra for you have to have knowledge no AI has been trained on. And because this speed of training will only get faster, that means being at most half a step behind the absolute cutting edge of a discipline or at least half a step ahead.

Straightforward doesn't mean easy. We have decades of familiarity with what's needed for this: the internal research group, the exploratory work, the dedication of time and expertise to testing, synthesizing, and clarifying new knowledge. But for most businesses, outside some specialized industries, this has been seen as a reputational luxury instead of basic capital investment. Much like a luxurious HQ or a vanity project, research was a signifier of success, not a requisite for it. Experts were required to do marketing, human resources development, or market research, not to think about it and move forward how it's done. While the display and application of valuable expertise was expensive this was indeed cost-effective, but if AI has changed anything, it's the value of being up-to-date. The premium you can get from reading and quoting the latest best-seller in business or technology is now close to zero. To get more, you'll have to quote the best-seller that hasn't been written yet.

This is a strategic change that depends on an updated self-understanding of an organization's source of competitive value and that will require a change in how we allocate resources and evaluate performance. Supporting and evaluating creative research work is different from supporting and evaluating the expression of already acquired knowledge; on the other hand, it's one most people find more intellectually and personally satisfying. But it's a change in processes, language, and culture not dissimilar in scale to previous changes driven by qualitative increases in the power of information technology

It's the sort of change that at first it's easy to dismiss as impractical and then impossible to justify not doing. In the gap between those moments lies immense opportunity.