The Wisdom Economy
In a world where everything is known, what truly matters is how we live.
By now, you’ve experienced some level of change in your personal and professional life because of Artificial Intelligence. Personally, it has made me significantly more productive, and it has made a material difference in our team’s ability to remain small while engaging in a level of diligence previously unattainable for a team our size.
But productivity is merely a byproduct of a much larger shift that AI is creating. In his article, Knowledge Work is Dying - Here’s What Comes Next, Joe Hudson makes a powerful observation.
AI models don’t sleep or burn out; they can absorb entire fields of study in days. One highly trained model will soon be able to outperform an expert in physics, law, and engineering – simultaneously at any hour. Facts, skills, and expertise will be increasingly commoditized, and even the smartest of us will be replaceable.
It’s easy to overlook how radical that is. Our entire society is built around knowledge as a scarce, precious resource. School systems, standardized tests, college pipelines, job interviews, LinkedIn profiles are all mechanisms to measure, prove, and reward how much you know… Now, imagine a world where all that is irrelevant, akin to the ability to build a fire today—occasionally useful, but mostly unnecessary in a world with light bulbs, central heating, and stove tops.
Enter the Wisdom Economy.
When knowledge is no longer scarce, what remains valuable? Wisdom. You can get answers about anything from AI, but how you use those answers takes wisdom.
Wisdom is how to live. It is the residue of mistakes, metabolized by time and reflection. It cannot be rushed, and it cannot be coded. It is an embodied – as in felt in the body – experience, guidance from the inside.
As someone who turns to Biblical truth for guidance in all things, the book of James tells us that “Wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial and sincere.”
A powerful mindset to strive for.
This shift is on par with the industrial revolution which moved us from labor to leverage and the information revolution which moved society from leverage to knowledge.
As we meet and analyze thousands of businesses each year, we are seeing a distinct shift away from the power of knowledge and acknowledging that (as Isaac on our team recently noted) the winners will be those who recognize that competitive moats are not about data or knowledge, they’re about creating systems that generate, process, and learn from data better than anyone else.
The frontier has moved. Knowledge is abundant; wisdom is scarce.
As we enter this next era, may we be the kind of builders and investors who don’t just ask what’s possible, but what’s wise.
That will be the real competitive advantage for our companies, our teams, and our lives.
A question that's been deep on my mind is, in the coming wisdom economy, how do we train and equip the next generation? Wisdom can perhaps be imparted to some degree, but as you mentioned, it's mostly lived and embodied. It is accumulated over years of trial and error, self-reflection, and self-correction. In other words, it requires being mediocre for a while while you learn what works and what doesn't, what you should and shouldn't do. And yet, the proliferation of AI means that there will be much less appetite in the market for folks who are still learning; there's much less incentive to train juniors when AI can do their tasks better and faster. The wise choice that optimizes for long-term outlook would be to hire juniors anyway and let them cut their teeth, but how many business leaders will actually choose that option?
Really appreciated this, Mark. Your framing of the wisdom economy is spot on. The leaders who thrive won’t just deploy AI to move faster. They’ll use it to move smarter — aligning action with purpose and learned experience. The challenge is to be wise in this new world -- and to use AI wisely.