Your Move, Chief
The people who will extract the most value from AI are not the people who understand it best.
That's a hard argument to make in a world that keeps promoting the prompters and the builders and the people who can explain transformer architecture at a dinner party. But I think it's right.
Jay Acunzo wrote a piece this week built around a scene from Good Will Hunting, one of my all time favorite movies. Robin Williams sits down next to Matt Damon on a park bench in Boston Public Garden and delivers an absolutely devastating (in a good way) monologue.
His argument is simple. Will Hunting is like an LLM. He's read everything. He knows the theory, the frameworks, the data. But what he can't do is tell you what it smells like inside the Sistine Chapel, because he's never been there.
That's the technical AI expert today. Enormous knowledge and the ability to get at information fast, but no lived context for what the work actually requires.
The person who spent ten years in enterprise sales knows where deals die.
The operator who's run customer success through a downturn knows what a churn signal actually feels like before it shows up in a dashboard.
The founder who's had a product roadmap collapse under them knows the difference between what customers say they want and what they'll pay for.
AI amplifies judgment for these people. It doesn’t create it.
Which means the practitioner with twenty years of scar tissue should not be threatened by AI. They're the ones best positioned to leverage it. They know which problems are worth solving. They know when an output seems accurate but is confidently wrong. They know what a good answer feels like because they've lived through enough bad ones.
Technical experts will build impressive things. The experienced operator will build the right things. Things that matter.
Acunzo closes by paraphrasing Williams. Your audience can't learn anything from you they can't read in a book, unless you talk about you. Same logic applies to AI. It can't do anything valuable for you unless you bring what you know from having actually lived the work.
Read it here: https://jayacunzo.com/blog/your-move-chief
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