What happens when your customer is smarter than you?

This week, Peter Diamandis asked a provocative question, roughly: What happens when your customer is smarter than you?

Picture a review meeting.

Your team spent three weeks on a strategy deck.

Your stakeholder pulls up their own AI-generated analysis. It’s more current. It includes variables you hadn’t considered. It reaches different conclusions, backed by logic that looks just as rigorous as yours.

The instinct is to panic: the person across the table is smarter than me. But that’s the wrong read.

The asymmetry was always shakier than we admitted

For decades, professional expertise rested partly on information asymmetry. You knew things others didn’t. You had the frameworks, the analysts, the data.

That is giving way to a different kind of asymmetry.

Inference costs have collapsed from roughly $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to well under a dollar today. Work that used to require expensive software and a team of analysts is increasingly available for a monthly subscription.For example in procurement, most RFP teams now use AI to draft scopes and analyze vendor responses before the first meeting.

I call this the era of asymmetric impact.

But let’s be honest about what this actually means. A polished AI deck is not the same as a correct one. These tools are confident, fluent, and often wrong in ways that are hard to spot if you don’t already know the terrain.

The stakeholder with the slick analysis may be better-informed OR they may be more confidently misinformed.

Usually it’s some of both.

We’ve seen this before with WebMD

When you search your symptoms, you access real peer-reviewed knowledge. But now you have ten plausible explanations and no way to pick the right one.

You still go to the doctor for clinical judgment.

AND, WebMD has existed for 25 years, doctors haven’t been displaced. Information democratization rarely eliminates professional roles. It reshapes them, slowly, and usually less dramatically than the early rhetoric predicts.The difference now is speed and scale, democratization is happening in real time. AI can argue any position with equal conviction.

Ask for a cost-cutting strategy, get a brilliant one.

Ask for the counter-argument, get an equally rigorous rebuttal.

Your stakeholders are likely paralyzed by an abundance of confident answers.

Where value actually migrates

When a critical input gets cheap, value moves to the next bottleneck. The popular version of this story says value moves “to judgment.” That may be directionally right for now.

But make no mistake, AI is getting better at judgment too, and “move up the stack” has an expiration date.

What seems more durable, at least for now:

Reading the room when you present. Building the trust that gets a reluctant SME to collaborate. Taking accountability when the call goes wrong. Navigating the lived reality of an organization that no knowledge graph fully captures.

Tools like Glean that unify scattered organizational knowledge are genuinely useful.

They raise everyone’s baseline. But a higher baseline doesn’t eliminate the need for people who can work at the top of it.

What’s Next

A smarter, AI-equipped stakeholder changes what the partnership is about. The baseline analysis that used to take weeks is now table stakes. It is the starting point, not the deliverable.

Stop defending the map, start guiding the path instead.

And here’s what I find liberating: much of that path is still being drawn.

The pen is your hands.

Until next time,

Ram

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Ram Srinivasan

MIT Alum | Author, The Conscious Machine | Global Future of Work and AI Adoption Leader published in Business Insider, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, MIT Executive Viewpoints and more.

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Disclaimer:

Ram Srinivasan currently serves as an Innovation Strategist and Transformation Leader, authoring groundbreaking works including "The Conscious Machine" and the upcoming "The Exponential Human."

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