In the summer of 1992, I had just graduated from university and I needed some quick cash for my upcoming trip to China, so I worked on a construction crew building a house in Utah.

I was a college boy who had studied Chinese history, so I was the lowest man on the construction crew’s totem pole, meaning that I spent my days carrying roofing materials up and down a ladder, screwing in boards for the subflooring, digging trenches, going to the store to get beer at the end of the day, stuff like that.

There was a guy on the crew, John Stuckey, who was in charge of one, and only one, thing, and that was carving the rocks for the house’s exterior walls. Sometimes he would spend all day carving just one rock (we were building an upscale house). He was a master of his trade, and he was paid a gazillion dollars for it.

John’s work was what made the customer happy. The rest of us, all 12, were basically just building a house for John to put his rocks on.

Now the segue into your world today:

AI is the sexy thing getting the media hype these days, but basically it’s just this: Tools subject to Moore’s Law (processing power doubles every two years) are being applied to something that was too big for them a couple years ago.

We’ve had 50 years to watch how tools subject to Moore’s Law affect the world around them, so we can pretty well predict how this, too, is going to play out…

White collar labor costs will be crushed, and the tools that are doing the crushing will eat away at the space that separates you from your competitors.

And this is why I mentioned John Stuckey. The big money, as it tends to do, is going to go to the people who can get the customers, and most everyone else will be working for them on minimum wage.

And remember that the customers are humans, and they need to be persuaded to give their hard-earned money to you, which requires that you differentiate yourself from your competitor, Company XYZ. And because processing power gets radically cheaper every couple years, the technical knowledge that used to separate you from Company XYZ is disappearing.

What remains, and is not disappearing, is competition based on who can best articulate and communicate ideas that are becoming increasingly similar.

Combine that shrinking territory for differentiation with the narrowing of your organization’s succession pipeline, and that means that for your organization to maintain a stable enterprise value, you need to make sure the juniors coming up already have those communication skills.