When Intelligence Is Cheap, Connection Is Priceless

The past week panic set in from the Something Big Is Happening article by Matt Shumer. The argument was that the AI pace of change is accelerating far faster than most of us realise. It was a reason to run to the hills, but panic is not a good strategy.

After reading, I want to put this into context with what’s happening around us and what I learned from a simple shared moment last week. 

When intelligence becomes free, the advantage will move to who can turn experience into meaning.

This is what I’ve been thinking since reading the Matt Shumer piece, ‘what does this actually mean for how we show up?’

Last Wednesday, in YATM Club, the AI acceleration narrative was part of the discussion with Mark Schaefer. 

Mark spoke about how we built our careers around the scarcity of intelligence. Competitive advantage came from knowing more and having specialist expertise.

“The economic value of intelligence is approaching zero,” Mark said.

If intelligence can be replicated instantly and cheaply, it stops being a differentiator. When so much is invested into AI infrastructure, the expectation of return is clear. Automation is not optional, it’s embedded in the business model.

I don’t want you to read and this article starts to become a spiral into fear.

Instead, there was a question Mark asked that helped to reframe and give hope.

“If intelligence becomes abundant, what becomes scarce?”

It’s around trust, meaning, connection and long-built relationships.

These are approaches you cannot automate, they take time. It requires consistency and care. That shift has started to reframe how I behave.

If intelligence becomes widely available, what matters is not who can publish more. It’s who people trust and feel connected to. The work we create has to mean something to the right people. As Mark says in Marketing Rebellion, “The most human company wins.”

AI generates output and output is cheap.

It can write all of our articles, produce scripts, summarise trends, build presentations, optimise workflows and mimic tone. It can compress time and remove friction. I was even drawn into the Clawdbot rabbit hole last week and it was comments from people such as Erin Buck, that gave me a shake as I was being hypnotised.

The danger isn’t the tool, it’s how easily we can lose ourselves in it.

During our session, Mark shared a story about standing at the top of the World Trade Center after completing a major consulting engagement. It should have felt like a pinnacle moment of success. Instead, Mark felt an unexpected emptiness, as if reaching the summit meant that everything from here was downhill.

When he wrote about that, Mark said the response was overwhelming, because it was honest.

AI could recreate the structure of that story and mimic Mark’s voice. It could not have lived what Mark experienced.

Thinking after the session and what also happened last week. Information is not meaning, content is not connection, output is not trust. 

Trust builds when someone shares what something meant to them, that can connect with someone else.

We live in a culture obsessed with productivity. 

I am guilty of it as I am always curious at finding a tool that makes things happen faster. I don’t want to ignore efficiency, but I also don’t want to optimise the humanity out of everything.

When everything is optimised, there has to be a compromise and other areas get left out, such as imperfection, a two way conversation, and trying to figure out, even the moments when it all feels awkward.

Those moments may feel inefficient, but they are often where trust forms.

If we respond to AI solely by producing more and wanting to become even faster, we risk flattening the very thing that makes us different.

The danger isn’t AI, the danger is forgetting other people.

I don’t know about you but I don’t want to spend my life focused on output and productivity.

With a week that had an AI slant, towards the end was the counter balance where people gathered for something simple, but so much fun.

PowerPoint Nights was an evening that celebrated hobbies and obsessions, in YATM Club. Here is a clip on Liam Toms presentation on ‘motorway service stations.’

It was Matt King’s idea and five-minute presentations that had nothing about productivity, just people sharing part so their lives that they care about. 

I loved it, we laughed, gave a round of applause after each presentation and nothing felt forced. It represented people sharing a slice of their lives they may not have presented before. That is what made it interesting. It was people being themselves and had sincerity to it. 

This wasn’t about knowledge transfer, it was about identity and feeling yourself. In a week dominated by headlines about acceleration and AI eliminating jobs, we created something that was wholeheartedly human. It was a place where we could all sit around the campfire.

If you are building a business, a community or putting more effort in your personal brand in 2026, the temptation will be there to compete on output.

By this, I mean the onus to publish more and to optimise relentlessly.

We know that output is no longer scarce, but meaning is.

The winners will not be the people who generate the most content, it will be those who create the most connection.

This might look like:

1) Protecting spaces where people can show up as themselves
2) Using AI to support responsiveness and find threads, but not hide behind generic output
3) Measuring trust (such as who subscribes and people who choose to stay), not just traffic

4) Figuring out in real time, where people are invited to participate and join in

5) Lean more into ‘I learned this’ storytelling rather than ‘you do this’ rhetoric
6) Be consistent is a space you are responsible for such as a newsletter or event. Trust built in routine

This all works by having to put the effort in. It just takes time.

Intelligence is becoming cheap and output is becoming easy. That means the bar is rising, not for productivity, but for being more of ourselves.

The future belongs to those who protect what makes us irreplaceable with the connections we make and the meaning that someone else interprets, so you feel right for them.

When everything can be generated, the only thing that can’t be faked is a real relationship.

The most strategic move we can make is simple, don’t forget the people.