A few years ago, I paid real money for an online course about something I could have googled. Not because the information wasn’t out there — it was — but because someone had packaged it up into a tidy sequence, with a PDF checklist at the end. That felt like value. I’d trade some cash for the shortcut.
I’m not sure that trade still makes sense.
There’s a question worth sitting with if you sell courses, run a newsletter, or operate any kind of advice business: what exactly are you selling? If the core of your offer is “I know how to do X, and for a fee, I’ll explain it to you,” then you’re competing — right now, today — with a chat interface that will do the same thing for free, in plain language, at any hour, and answer every follow-up question without sighing.
That’s not pessimism. It’s just arithmetic.
The Commodity Shift
The thing is, knowledge transfer was already becoming cheaper. YouTube, forums, documentation sites — the raw material was free or nearly so long before any of us had heard of a large language model. What the structured course or the curated newsletter offered was organisation and trust. Someone had done the sorting for you.
AI has now taken that arrangement apart. Ask Copilot in Microsoft 365 how to build a pivot table, how to structure a client proposal, how to read a balance sheet, or how to write a meeting agenda — and you’ll get a clear, accurate, step-by-step answer in seconds. It knows context. It remembers what you asked two prompts ago. It adjusts when you say “that’s too complicated, simplify it.” The experience of learning from it is genuinely conversational in a way that a pre-recorded video module is not.
For anyone whose business rests primarily on the instruction layer — here’s how to do the thing — that shift deserves honest attention.
What Doesn’t Commoditise
I don’t think this means the advice economy is finished. But I do think it clarifies what was always the actual product, beneath the packaging.
What an AI won’t give you is accountability. It won’t check whether you actually implemented what it told you, or notice that you’ve been stuck on step three for six weeks because there’s something uncomfortable underneath the technical question. A good advisor, coach, or community does that.
It also won’t give you judgement built from real exposure to your specific industry, your clients, your context. I can ask Copilot about pricing strategy for an MSP, and I’ll get a reasonable answer. But the answer from someone who has personally renegotiated forty MSP contracts and remembers what went wrong — that carries a different weight.
The value proposition that survives isn’t “I’ll explain the concept.” It’s “I’ve seen this pattern before, here’s what it usually means, and here’s what I’d actually do.” That’s the part that takes years to earn and can’t be scraped.
What I’m Watching
My own approach has shifted. The things I now put into writing — whether that’s a post, a session, or anything structured — I try to hold to a higher bar than “here’s how to do X.” Anyone can get that from Copilot. What I’m aiming for is the observation behind the explanation: the why, the tradeoff, the thing that only becomes clear once you’ve been surprised by the edge case.
The knowledge economy isn’t dying. It’s just shedding the parts that were never really the point.
CIAOPS 