When Experience Is No Longer Enough
For most of my career, expertise carried its own weight.
If somebody could explain a complicated subject clearly, write intelligently about it, create a strong presentation and answer difficult questions, you assumed they knew what they were talking about.
That assumption has become dangerous.
AI can now produce a polished article, presentation, proposal, strategy document or point of view in minutes. Someone with relatively little experience can look remarkably knowledgeable from a distance.
This doesn't make genuine expertise less important. It makes the appearance of expertise less valuable.
But there's another side to this conversation that rarely gets questioned. We're quick to challenge the credibility of someone with little experience. Yet we often give people with decades of experience the benefit of the doubt.
When Experience Becomes a Limitation
Imagine someone who's spent 30 years in the same industry. They've seen markets change, dealt with difficult clients, solved complicated problems and built a reputation for knowing exactly what they're doing.
Naturally, when a problem comes along, they're the person everyone turns to. They've seen it all before, and there's comfort in knowing that someone with that much experience is handling the situation.
But there's a catch. This person still approaches problems the same way they did years ago. They rely on familiar methods, established processes and solutions that have always worked. And to be fair, those methods may still produce good results.
Now imagine someone who's only been in the industry for five years. They haven't experienced nearly as much, but they've kept up with new technology, different approaches and better ways of working. They can solve the same problem, achieve a similar result and do it in half the time.
Both people know what they're doing. Both can deliver. But one is relying on what has worked in the past, while the other is also paying attention to what's possible today.
And yet, when it comes to choosing between them, who do you think most people would trust first?
Experience Isn't the Whole Story
This is where the gap between expertise and credibility becomes interesting. We tend to trust people because of what they've achieved, but we don't always question whether the thinking behind those achievements has kept up with the times.
Thirty years of experience can be an enormous advantage. But so can five years of learning new ways to solve old problems.
The real difference may have very little to do with how long someone has been doing something.
And that's where AI introduces another complication.
