Where AI and Human Expertise Create Real Business Value
Advancements in AI – especially in LLMs and agentic systems – are accelerating at an almost unbelievable pace. Week by week, these tools become more capable, more integrated, and more accessible.
Alongside these improvements, the cost of compute continues to drop. Sam Altman recently shared that the cost to use a given level of AI drops roughly 10x every 12 months. To put that into perspective, the token cost between GPT-4 (early 2023) and GPT-4o (mid-2024) dropped by an astonishing 150x.
This isn’t just progress, it’s the groundwork for commoditization (or democratization, depending on your lens). We’ve seen this pattern before: as powerful technologies become cheaper and more available, they shift from cutting-edge advantage to foundational infrastructure. The same is already happening with LLMs.
So the question on many leaders’ minds is: Where should I enter?
Yes, the opportunity ahead is massive. But no, the answer isn’t to build your own LLM. That game is reserved for companies with billions to spend and billions more to maintain parity in an arms race of scale, data, and compute.
The real opportunity lies in the application layer.
This is the space between powerful general-purpose models and specific business domains. It’s the intersection of deep, human industry expertise and transformational AI capabilities—and it’s ground zero for value creation.
Let’s not forget: relationships are human. Decision-making is emotional. Trust is earned, not coded. Context matters. Style matters. Emotional intelligence matters.
And for now, and the foreseeable future, these human factors remain irreplaceable.
This is a pattern we’ve seen throughout history. During the industrial revolution, the dot com boom, mobile apps, etc., the early stages of product development were marked by large discrepancies in quality. But as technology matured, quality and experience began to converge. Differentiation shifted from product performance to something less tangible, something more human.
We’re witnessing the same shift now, only on a much faster timeline.
When technology becomes more or less equal across providers, the differentiator becomes the person. The expert. The voice. The guide.
If the tools are largely the same, if the outputs are increasingly similar, the reason someone chooses you isn’t about the tech—it’s about you. Your voice. Your judgment. Your empathy. Your industry insight. Your ability to contextualize solutions in a way that resonates.
In what comes next, human expertise doesn’t disappear—it becomes more valuable than ever. The application layer is where that expertise lives, and it’s where the next wave of business innovation will come from.
