AI is changing something more fundamental than how we produce work. It’s changing how we recognize expertise.

For most of my career, I trusted a simple signal.

If someone produced thoughtful work, I assumed there was thoughtful reasoning behind it. A strong proposal suggested they understood the problem. A polished presentation suggested they had done the homework. A working system suggested they knew why it had been designed that way.

AI is beginning to separate those two things.

Today it’s possible to create remarkably sophisticated work without developing an equally sophisticated understanding of it. That doesn’t make the work useless, and it certainly doesn’t mean everyone using AI is pretending to know more than they do. It does mean the finished artifact can no longer prove what we once assumed it did.

That’s the idea I explore in this first video essay.

Rather than arguing that AI is making people less competent, I argue something more subtle: one of our oldest signals of competence has become much less reliable. If polished work is no longer evidence of understanding, organizations will need better ways to recognize judgment, expertise, and accountability.

I’d love to hear where you think this is already happening in your own work.

This is the first in a series of short video essays exploring how AI is changing organizations, judgment, and professional value.

Key ideas

• AI can produce polished work without guaranteeing understanding.
• Organizations still rely on polished artifacts as a proxy for competence.
• Judgment is becoming more valuable, not less.
• We need new ways to evaluate expertise in an AI-assisted world.

This essay is the first in an ongoing series exploring how AI is changing organizations, decision making, and professional value. Rather than focusing on new models or product announcements, I’m interested in the slower changes: the assumptions we’ve relied on for decades that may no longer hold.