Knowing Things Isn't a Business Model Anymore

For twenty years, professional services firms sold access to what they knew. The client didn't know what the market looked like, what competitors were charging, or whether the advice they were getting was good. That gap was the product.

It's closing. Fast.

Intelligence abundance is what happens when the cost of generating a usable analysis drops to near zero.

The expertise still exists. The scarcity doesn't.

The accounting firm, whose value was "we understand tax law, and you don't," now competes with a client who spent an hour with a language model before the meeting. The staffing firm whose edge was knowing the market rate for a role now talks to buyers who ran the same query before picking up the phone.

Abundance does not raise all boats. It sinks the ones built on information asymmetry.

A model can analyze. It cannot stake its fee on the outcome. It can recommend. It cannot lose money when the recommendation fails.

The firms that thrive here are the ones that shift from knowing to doing — and from doing to being accountable for what they produce.

"We know things you don't" requires almost nothing once the knowledge transfers. "We are accountable for what happens next" requires skin in the game. Most firms won't do it. The ones that do will win.

Every professional services firm has a marketing function, or a space where one should be. Most of it runs on the same asymmetry logic.

The agency knows things the client doesn't know. The client measures the relationship by deliverables: did we get the posts? did the newsletter go out?

That's the equivalent of measuring an accounting firm by whether they filed your taxes — not whether the strategy they implemented saved you anything.

The abundance shift hits marketing the same way it hits every other advisory sector. You can now ask a language model to benchmark your agency's performance against industry medians and evaluate whether your current spend maps to your growth stage. You don't need the agency to be the smartest person in the room.

What you can't get from any model is an operator who will build the system, run it, and be accountable when it doesn't produce.

The value of a marketing partner is no longer "they know things." It's "they're responsible for what happens."

Most agencies still run on asymmetry. They trade on the gap. As long as the client can't evaluate whether the work is performing, the agency is safe.

That model is ending because clients are becoming sophisticated enough to ask the right questions. When a founder can run a gap analysis on their own marketing function in twenty minutes, "trust us, we know" stops being sufficient.

The transition isn't from expert to irrelevant. It's from expert-who-knows to expert-who-delivers-and-can-prove-it.

Judgment is still scarce. Execution is still hard. Accountability is still rare.

Those three things are what abundance cannot compress. They're also what most firms are worst at selling — because selling them requires agreeing in advance on what "working" looks like. It requires being willing to lose something when it doesn't.

That's the new value proposition. It's harder to sell than "we know things you don't."

The best argument I've heard for why AI won't take your job

Box CEO Aaron Levie on Platformer: agents will multiply the workers using software, not eliminate them. The counterargument to the piece above — worth reading both. 

Abundant Intelligence Is Here

The post that put the "abundant intelligence" framing into wider circulation. Worth seeing where the phrase came from. 

What Worries Ezra Klein Most About Abundance

Klein and Derek Thompson revisit their Abundance thesis a year on. The parts about where it fell short are more interesting than the parts about where it worked.