That isn't the problem.
What Expertise Really Means
A few days ago, I was reading a Forbes article about the skills communication professionals will need as AI becomes part of everyday work. There were eighteen of them including curiosity, critical thinking, adaptability, strategic clarity, relationship building, context and discernment. It even included knowing when to say nothing at all.
It was a good list. But the longer I looked at it, the more I realised I wasn't looking at eighteen different skills. I was looking at different versions of the same one: judgement.
And that matters because AI is changing what experience is worth. For most of our careers, knowing more gave you an advantage. Experience meant you had answers other people didn't have to. You had read more, seen more, made more mistakes and spent years building knowledge that others simply hadn't gained yet.
That gap is disappearing fast. Today, anyone can ask AI a question and get an answer in seconds that might once have taken an experienced professional hours to research and write. They can turn it into a polished report, presentation, email and strategy document. They can even sound like an expert on something they discovered ten minutes ago.
So the uncomfortable question isn't whether AI will know more than you. It probably already does.
The more interesting question is this: if knowledge is no longer rare, what makes your experience valuable?
When More Information Creates Less Clarity
AI can now produce more information than any team could reasonably use. It can give you ten options, compare ideas, summarise hundreds of pages and turn the results into something polished in seconds. But more information does not always make a decision easier.
You can already see this happening inside businesses. Teams have more reports, documents and data, but people are still unsure about the priority. Leaders receive polished recommendations, but someone still has to decide which assumptions are sound, what the risks are and what actually matters right now.
That is where judgement becomes more valuable. AI can give you an answer, but it does not fully understand the room the answer is going into. It does not know the history between two people, the pressure sitting behind a decision or why something that worked six months ago may be wrong today. Context changes the value of an answer.
This is why producing more can sometimes creates less clarity. Someone still has to separate what is useful from what simply looks impressive. Someone has to question the confident answer, notice what is missing and decide what deserves the room's attention.
That person is no longer valuable because they have access to more information than everyone else. They are valuable because they know what to do with it.
The Value Is Moving
I have spent years working with people who know far more about their industries that I ever will. CEOs, senior leaders, technical experts, consultants and specialists who have build their knowledge over decades. Yet the people who make the biggest impact are not always the ones who know the most.
They are often the people who can hear ten different opinions and spot the one issue everyone else has missed. They can listen to a complicated discussion and make it simple. They know when to challenge an idea, when to ask another qustion and when the smartest thing they can do is say nothing.
That ability usually comes from experience. Not because experience gives you all the answers, but because you have seen what happens after the answer. You have watched all good ideas fail. You have seen bad decisions look sensible at the time. You have learned that what works with one client, team or market can fail completely with another.
And what is why I think we are about to see a major change in what we call expertise.
