Why AI Getting Better Makes Your Imperfections More Valuable

An investor who is among the earliest AI bulls in Silicon Valley recently shared this about his own company: AI token costs double every 45 days. Productivity gains from all that spending: 5%. He does not know how many other companies are on the same curve, but expects most of them will be there within a few years. There is a reason for this gap that rarely gets named. The tasks AI handles well are mostly in the execution layer: standardized reports, data cleanup, process automation. AI does them fast, and the cost keeps falling. But the things that actually make a company more competitive are almost never settled at the execution layer. Harvard Business School lecturer Christina Wallace noticed something similar from a different angle. She argues that betting everything on a single full-time job is one of the highest-risk choices a person can make today. When one job carries your entire income, your professional network, your sense of identity, any shift in that position leaves you with almost no room to move. She calls it treating your career like a single stock. Marketing researcher Mark Schaefer found another layer of the same thing: AI-powered service is approaching perfection, available around the clock, infinitely patient, endlessly personalized. Yet the brands clients keep returning to are the ones with a point of view, an opinion, a willingness to say no. AI raised the floor. It also made something scarce: your real judgment. Two different observations, two sides of the same shift. One path is to become more precise and efficient in the AI era, aligning your work with what AI already does well. The other is to let AI handle execution and spend your energy building the kind of judgment that crosses domains and earns trust, including the parts that are not especially polished. Christina Wallace shut down her company when she was 28. Harvard turned that failure into a case study and taught it for nine years. Around 900 MBA students a year sat down to debate whether she should have kept going. The company is gone. The conversation is still running.