The Collapse of the Production Premium

For decades, the production premium was real. If you could produce—if you could execute a task better, faster, more reliably than others—you had value in the market. You could be less insightful, less strategic, less articulate. But if you could ship code, write copy, create designs, analyze data—if you could execute—you had a job. The premium was on skill, not on judgment or taste.

AI disrupts this completely. Not because AI is better at everything—it isn't. But because AI removes the scarcity that created the production premium. If everyone has access to the same AI systems, then the ability to execute at baseline quality is no longer rare. Your ability to write a competent marketing email is no longer a differentiator when the system can generate something competent instantly.

What becomes rare—what becomes genuinely scarce—is the ability to direct that work. To look at what the AI produced and know whether it's actually good. To decide what problems are worth solving and which aren't. To make choices when the path isn't obvious. To build something that actually matters instead of just optimizing what already exists.

This is true up and down the organization. The manager of a team that uses AI to do more work faster doesn't need a larger team to produce more output. They need better judgment about what's worth producing. The individual contributor who adopts AI doesn't have more time because they've saved time on execution—they have the same amount of time, and now they spend it on direction instead of production. The executive using AI to scale strategy doesn't need more strategic options; they need better taste in which options are actually worth scaling.