The Great Repricing
The most uncomfortable truth in business right now.
AI has made average humans worth less than ever, and exceptional humans worth more than ever.
Two things are happening at the same time, and they sound like opposites.
AI is the single most powerful deflationary force ever applied to human work. It is quietly making most jobs cheaper, and in time will make many of them disappear.
And at the very same moment, the rarest kind of human being has never been worth more in the history of capitalism.
Both are true. At once. That’s the whole story, and almost nobody is holding both halves at the same time.
Most people pick a side. The doomers say AI is coming for all of us. The cheerleaders say it’s just another tool.
They’re both wrong, because they’re both flattening something that isn’t flat.
What’s actually happening is a repricing.
A violent, fast, brutal repricing of human capital.
And the gap between what a great human is worth and what an average one is worth has turned into a canyon.
Average has never been worth less
Let me be blunt, because softness here doesn’t help anyone.
If your job is to take an input, process it in a predictable way, and produce a predictable output, you are now competing with something that does that instantly, at near-zero cost, around the clock, without complaint.
This isn’t a prediction. It’s a payroll line.
Entry-level white-collar hiring at big tech firms collapsed to around 7% of new hires in 2024, more than 50% below pre-pandemic levels. Entry-level job postings across the economy have fallen by roughly a third since early 2023. Wall Street banks are openly planning to remove something like 200,000 roles over the next few years, concentrated in exactly the analyst and back-office work AI now does faster. Law firms are slowing their first-year intake. The Big Four are restructuring graduate audit and advisory.
These aren’t recessions. The companies are profitable. They’ve simply discovered that a large chunk of what they used to pay humans for is now cheaper to run on a model.
And here’s the part that stings. Being a mediocre employee used to be survivable. You could hide in the layers. Coast on the average. Let the system carry you.
That era is over.
In a company with a thick middle and a lot of process, a weak performer is invisible.
In a lean, AI-powered company, every single person’s output is visible, measurable, and comparable to a machine. The weak performer doesn’t get hidden. They get noticed.
And then they get replaced, either by a tool or by one exceptional person doing the work of five.
It has never been easier to identify and remove a bad employee. That’s not cruelty. It’s clarity. And clarity is arriving whether we like it or not.
Exceptional has never been worth more
Now the other half. The half the doomers miss completely.
While the floor is collapsing, the ceiling is going through the roof.
Because here is what AI cannot do, and shows no sign of doing.
AI cannot set the vision.
It cannot decide what’s worth building in the first place, or why now, or why it matters.
It cannot walk into a room and make twelve talented, sceptical people believe in a future that doesn’t exist yet.
It cannot read the unspoken thing in a negotiation.
It cannot hold conviction through the dip when every number says quit.
It cannot create a feeling.
It cannot motivate a team at 9pm when the launch is on fire.
It cannot judge, in the genuinely ambiguous moment, with incomplete information and real stakes, which way to jump.
Someone still has to do all of that. A human, in a room, carrying the weight.
And that human, the one with vision, conviction, judgment, taste, and the experience to know which rules to break, is now sitting on top of a machine that multiplies everything they do by an order of magnitude.
That’s the repricing. The same scarce qualities that always mattered, now amplified by a lever longer than anything we’ve ever had. The result is that the most valuable people on earth just became dramatically more valuable, because their judgment now commands an army of AI.
Salary data already shows it starting. Professionals with genuine AI fluency are commanding wages 28 to 56% above their peers. And that’s just the early, crude signal. The real premium isn’t for people who can use AI. It’s for people who have rare human judgment and use AI. Those two things together are about to become the most expensive combination in the labour market.
If you are great, companies should do almost anything to keep you. And the smart ones already know it.
Royal Marines, not the Territorial Army
Let me tell you how this has changed who I hire.
I used to think about hiring the way most people do. Find someone competent, with the right experience, who can do the job. Fill the box on the org chart.
I don’t think like that anymore.
Now I hire Royal Marines, not the Territorial Army.
Here’s what I mean. The instinct in a world of AI is to just hire people who can use the tools. The “prompt natives.” And yes, AI fluency is now table stakes, getting people into the business who genuinely operate AI as a force multiplier is a superpower in itself.
But fluency alone gives you the Territorial Army. Capable, trained, useful in a fight. Not who you want when the stakes are real.
The Royal Marine is the rare combination. AI-native and deep human judgment. Someone who wields the most powerful tools we’ve ever built, and also has the experience, the conviction, the taste, and the sheer operating skill to point that power at the right thing and execute without being told how.
That person is worth ten of anyone else. Maybe a hundred. And there are very few of them, which is exactly why they’re worth so much.
I am hiring better people than I have ever hired in my career. Not despite AI. Because of it. Because the leverage is now so extreme that one extraordinary hire changes the entire trajectory of a company, and I’d rather have six of those than sixty of anyone else.
What this actually looks like, from my own desk
I’ll make it concrete, because the theory means nothing without the lived reality.
I recently wrote a board report. A serious one. It pulled together an entire sales pipeline analysis, a read on recent valuations across the market, and substantial input from team members across the business, all of it amalgamated, synthesised, and written in my voice, for my board.
That report would have taken me a week not long ago personally, with input and effort from many others in the business.
It took me two days on and off and a couple of short internal questions checking “Is this analysis correct?”
And I want to be precise about something. Two days is exactly what I’d expect at this stage. I wouldn’t want it to take less, because the thinking, the judgment, the editorial taste, the decision about what actually matters to my board, that’s the part that’s still mine, and that’s the part that should take time.
AI carried the load. I carried the meaning.
This is the pattern across everything I’m building right now. I am shipping products for new businesses at a pace I have genuinely never witnessed in my career. I am executing my vision twenty, thirty, honestly probably fifty times faster than I could a few years ago.
But notice what didn’t change. I am still the driving force of the entire thing.
The vision is mine. The conviction is mine. The judgment about what to build and why is mine. AI didn’t replace the founder. It put a jet engine on the founder.
That’s the future for everyone who’s any good. Not replacement. Amplification, so extreme it feels like a different job.
The most dangerous advice in business right now
Here’s where I’ll be genuinely controversial, because this is the part leaders are going to get wrong, and it’s going to cost them everything.
The kindest-sounding instincts in management are now the most destructive.
“Let’s protect everyone through the transition.” “Let’s pay fairly within bands so nobody feels undervalued.” “Let’s not let our top people run away with all the reward, it isn’t fair on the team.” “Let’s keep our headcount, our people are our family.”
Every one of those sentences, which sounds warm and decent and responsible, is now a slow act of corporate suicide.
Because in a world where one exceptional person is worth fifty average ones, paying them roughly the same is not fairness. It’s a tax on your best people that drives them straight out the door, into the arms of a competitor who understands the new maths, or into building the thing that kills you.
Protecting average performers out of loyalty doesn’t protect them. It just dilutes the people carrying the company, demoralises your best, and slows the whole machine down until something faster eats you.
The humane thing and the commercial thing have flipped. The truly respectful act now is to identify your exceptional people and pay them like the rare assets they are. To be honest, early and clearly, with the people who aren’t going to make it in this new world, rather than letting them drift toward a cliff. And to stop pretending that everyone is equally valuable when the market is screaming, at the top of its lungs, that they are not.
This is hard. It cuts against decades of how we were taught to lead. But the companies that flinch from it will lose to the ones that don’t.
So what do you do with this
If you’re building or leading anything right now, here’s how I’d act on it.
Reprice your own people in your head, honestly. Who are the genuine Royal Marines, AI-native with rare human judgment? Those are your franchise. Build the company around them.
Pay the exceptional like they’re exceptional. Break your own bands if you have to. The cost of losing one is now catastrophic. The cost of overpaying one is trivial by comparison.
Stop hiring to fill boxes. Hire to add force multipliers, or don’t hire at all. Every average addition now dilutes you in a way it never used to.
Be honest with the people who aren’t going to make it, sooner and kinder than feels comfortable. Letting them drift is the real cruelty.
Invest in yourself like your life depends on it. Because in this market, the most valuable thing you can be is the rare human with judgment, conviction, and an AI stack that makes you unstoppable.
The thing to hold onto
The doomers tell you AI makes humans worthless. They have it exactly backwards.
AI makes average humans cheaper, yes.
But it makes exceptional humans the most valuable asset in the entire economy.
Human capital at its highest level, vision, conviction, judgment, the ability to make people believe and to feel something in a room, is the most ingenious and valuable asset any company will ever hold.
AI didn’t diminish that. It put a multiplier on it that we’ve never had before.
The question facing every single one of us is no longer “will AI take my job.”
It’s “am I the kind of human worth multiplying.”
Become that.
And then go and command the value you’re worth.