For most of my working life, expertise has been a bottleneck. The person who really understood how to structure a sound investigation, write a watertight scope of work, run a proper risk assessment, or close out a project without loose ends — that person was rare, busy, and usually expensive. Their knowledge lived in their head, in a handful of dog-eared templates, or in a methodology a consulting firm guarded like a recipe. If you wanted the good version of something, you waited for the expert, or you paid for them, or you simply went without and hoped your rough effort was good enough.
So here is the question I keep turning over: what happens to a business when those world-class practices stop being scarce? When the best way to do a thing is no longer trapped in one person’s experience, but packaged as a skill that anyone can call on, inside the tools they already use every day?
We are closer to that than most people realise.
The recipe leaves the head of the chef
Think about what a “best practice” actually is. It’s a sequence of good decisions someone learned the hard way, refined over years, and turned into a repeatable approach. The hard part was never the steps themselves — it was knowing them, and knowing when to apply them.
Copilot changes who has access to that sequence. With agents and custom skills, an organisation can take its genuinely good way of doing something — the proposal process the best salesperson uses, the onboarding checklist that actually works, the way the sharpest analyst pressure-tests a forecast — and make it available to everyone. Not as a PDF nobody reads, but as something you ask for in the flow of work. You’re in Word drafting a statement of work, and the expert method is right there. You’re in Excel staring at a model, and Copilot applies the same scrutiny your best analyst would, in the same Excel you already had open.
The recipe leaves the head of the chef. And once it does, the people who were never going to become experts can still produce expert-grade work.
The gap that quietly disappears
I find this genuinely interesting, because of what it does to the gap between the few and the many.
In most businesses there’s an enormous distance between your top performer and your average one. Not because the average person isn’t capable, but because they never had the top performer’s accumulated judgement. When that judgement becomes a skill anyone can invoke — when the new hire in their second week can ask Copilot to apply the company’s proven method and get most of the way there — that gap narrows fast.
I’ve watched a junior team member produce a client response that, two years ago, would have needed three rounds of review from someone senior. The senior person still added value. But the starting point was already good, because the method was baked in rather than carried around in someone’s memory. That’s a different shape of organisation. The floor rises. The distance between your best and your rest gets smaller.
And that should make business leaders pause, because so much of how we structure teams, pay people, and value experience assumes that gap stays wide.
When the answer is cheap, the action becomes everything
Here’s the part I think is easy to miss. If the best way to do something is available to everyone — including your competitors — then knowing the best practice stops being an advantage. Everyone has it. It becomes table stakes.
So what’s left? Judgement about which problem to point it at. Taste about what “good” actually means for your customers. And the plain willingness to act. When the expert method is in the room, the question shifts from who knows how to who actually does something with it.
I’ve seen two businesses with the same tools and the same access. One treats Copilot as a curiosity someone in IT is “looking into.” The other has quietly rebuilt how its people work — its real methods captured as agents in Teams, surfaced where decisions get made, used a hundred times a day. Same starting line. Wildly different outcomes. The difference wasn’t the technology. It was the decision to act on it.
That’s the uncomfortable, liberating truth of broadly available expertise. It doesn’t reward the people who hoarded knowledge. It rewards the ones who move.
What I’m watching
I don’t think this makes expertise worthless — I think it relocates it. The value moves from holding the knowledge to deciding what to do with it, and to having the judgement to know when the expert method is wrong for this particular case. Those things are harder to automate, and they’re suddenly worth far more.
What I’m watching for is which organisations notice the shift early. The ones who capture their best practices as Copilot skills and put them in everyone’s hands aren’t just becoming more efficient. They’re flattening a hierarchy that has shaped business for a very long time. The expert is no longer a bottleneck. The expert is in the room — for everyone, all the time.
The only question left is what you do now that they are.
CIAOPS 