In a world where everyone has access to information, what is experience actually worth?

It's a question I've been thinking about a lot lately. I spent years being the person clients came to when they needed answers. Today, answers are everywhere.

Need a contract? There are templates. Need a logo? There is Canva. Need marketing copy? There are countless tools ready to write it for you. Need legal information? Open Google, open ChatGPT, and it's there before you've finished typing the question.

The barrier to information has never been lower.

A recent interaction reminded me of that. A business owner came to me for help with a project. We discussed the scope, what I thought they needed, and how I would approach it. Later, they decided to tackle part of the work themselves before bringing it back for legal review.

If I'm being honest, my initial reaction surprised me. I felt annoyed.

Not because they used AI. I use AI. My firm uses AI. At this point, pretending these tools do not exist, or that our own clients are not out there using them, would be ridiculous. What bothered me was smaller and less flattering than that. 

It was the realization that anything of value I share in a conversation can now be plugged into a tool and turned into a first draft within minutes.

For a few days I sat with a genuinely bad idea. Maybe the move is to be more guarded. Say less in the room. Keep the good questions to myself, hold back the thinking, meter it out only after somebody has paid for it. 

I'm not proud of that instinct, but I had it, and I'd bet I'm not the only one who has had some version of it lately.

The more I sat with that thought, the more I realized I was asking the wrong question.

The question isn't whether people will use AI. They will. The question is whether access to information has changed the value of expertise.

I don't think it has. I think it has clarified it.

There has never been a time when people had more access to answers, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I think business owners should be resourceful. They should learn, they should ask questions, they should use every tool available to them. 

What I've started questioning is whether we've confused access to information with expertise.

Knowing something and knowing what to do with it are two very different things. One comes from information. The other comes from experience.

Some of the most valuable conversations I have with clients have very little to do with the document sitting in front of us. They come from the follow-up questions. The "have you thought about this?" moments. The situations I've watched play out before that they have encountered it yet.

One of my favorite questions to ask a client is, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” It sounds simple, and the answer changes everything. 

The right decision for a practice that plans to stay small is not the right decision for a practice that wants to hire, open a second location, bring on a partner, or eventually sell. 

No template knows that. That comes from conversation, context, and having been around long enough to have seen the various outcomes play out.

I was recently talking through the difference between business owners who are crushing it and the ones who aren't. More often than not, the difference isn't talent or intelligence or resources. It's complacency.

The ones who are crushing it are not ignoring AI. They use the tools, they learn, they experiment. But they don't stop there. They keep asking questions, they seek out expertise, they challenge their own assumptions. They understand that getting an answer is not the same thing as making the right decision.

Which brings me back to that project.

The draft the client brought me was good. Genuinely good, better than what they had before, and I want to be honest about that because the temptation is to tell you it was a mess. It wasn't. 

But it was missing things, and one of those things mattered- enormously. 

There was language sitting in that document that would have put them right back into the exact problem they wanted to hire me to get rid of. The tool had produced something clean, confident, and complete-looking, and yet it had reconstructed the original problem.

Not because the tool failed. It answered the question it was asked, and it answered it well. Nobody asked the other question, because nobody knew the other question should have been asked.

So, I was annoyed at the wrong thing.

Nothing got taken. They could have my questions, all of them, and they'd still be holding a document they couldn't read.

So, I don’t know that the future is “professionals versus AI”. I think it's more like professionals and AI, and the ones who thrive will be the ones who use the tools without mistaking the output for the outcome.

The first draft may be free. The judgment isn't.

I'll leave you with the same question I've been asking myself.

In a world where everyone has access to information, what is experience actually worth?

I think it's worth more than it was. Not because it's rarer, but because everything around it got cheap, and for the first time you can see clearly what was doing the work the whole time.