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.

For years I measured a good session by how much I crammed into it. Steps, screenshots, settings, the lot. If someone walked out with a longer to-do list than they arrived with, I’d done my job. I don’t see it that way anymore.

The shift happened quietly. I started noticing that the sessions people remembered weren’t the ones where I taught the most. They were the ones where something clicked and a person suddenly wanted to work differently. The instruction was almost beside the point. What stuck was the wanting.

Knowing how isn’t the same as wanting to

You can show someone exactly how to do a thing and watch them never do it. We’ve all run that webinar. The hands-on steps are perfect, the recording goes up, and three weeks later nothing has changed in their business. The knowledge landed. The desire never did.

I see this constantly with Microsoft 365 Copilot. I can demonstrate how to summarise a long thread in Outlook, how to pull the action items out of a Teams meeting, how to draft a first version of a proposal in Word. People nod. They get it. But the ones who actually change are the ones who leave thinking, “I never want to scroll through forty unread emails by hand again.” That sentence isn’t instruction. It’s appetite. And appetite is what does the work after the session ends.

The job is to make the better way feel obvious

So now, when I’m putting together a workshop or a video or even a short email to a client, I’m not really asking what I should teach. I’m asking what I want them to start wanting once it’s over.

That changes how I build the thing. Instead of opening with a feature, I open with a moment they recognise — the Friday afternoon spent rebuilding a status report they’ve already written four times this month. Then I show Copilot pulling that report together from the documents already sitting in their SharePoint, in about a minute. I’m not listing what it can do. I’m letting them feel the gap between how they work now and how they could. Close that gap in front of someone and they don’t need convincing. They’ve already decided.

The same logic runs through everything I put out. A YouTube clip, a Loop page I share with a patron group, a single line in a newsletter — they all work better when they leave a person slightly dissatisfied with their current way of doing things, in the best possible sense.

What I’m watching now

The tooling has never been easier to demonstrate. Copilot will happily show off. The harder, more interesting question is whether the content around it makes anyone actually want a different working life.

That’s the part I keep returning to. Teaching the steps is the easy half. Teaching someone to want the outcome — that’s where the real change starts, and it’s the bit I’m still learning to do better.

A while back, over coffee, someone asked me which clever AI trick had impressed me most this year. I disappointed them. The thing that stuck with me wasn’t a trick at all. It was a question I now ask myself most afternoons: of everything I did today, how much of it didn’t actually need me?

It’s an uncomfortable question, and it should be. Sit with it long enough and you start noticing how much of your week is just movement — chasing the same status update, rewriting the same kind of email, copying numbers from one place to another. Honest work, sure. But not the work only you can do.

The instinct to hold on

Most people, when they feel AI getting close to their job, pull their work in tighter. They guard it. They want to prove the human bit still matters. I understand the reflex, but I think it’s backwards. The value was never in the doing. It was in knowing what was worth doing in the first place.

The people I admire most are doing the opposite. They’re hunting for things to hand over. They treat every repetitive task as a candidate for handover, not a badge of how busy they are. When a reply lands that says the same thing they’ve written forty times, they don’t write it again — they ask Copilot in Outlook to draft it and spend their attention on the one paragraph that’s genuinely new. When a long Teams thread needs catching up on, they let Copilot summarise it and read the summary, not the forty messages.

That’s not laziness. That’s deciding where your judgement is actually worth spending. Every hour you claw back from the routine is an hour you can point at something that actually moves the business.

Hand it over once, properly

Here’s the part most people miss, though. Handing a task to AI once is a parlour trick. The real shift happens when you stop doing the task and start building the thing that does the task.

I’ve watched a business owner take the monthly client report — the one that ate a Friday afternoon every month — and rebuild it as a flow. Power Automate pulls the numbers, Copilot drafts the commentary in the same tone she’d use, and the whole thing lands in a SharePoint folder before she’s had her second coffee. She doesn’t make the report any more. She looks after the thing that makes the report.

And that’s the bit worth understanding. Once the work runs on its own, your job changes. You’re no longer the one producing the output — you’re the one watching the machine that produces it, and adjusting it when it drifts. When the tone goes a bit flat, you fix the instructions, not the document. When the numbers look off, you check the flow, not the spreadsheet. Your effort moves up a level.

That’s where the real return sits. Not in doing the task faster. In stepping back from the task entirely and tending the system instead.

What I’m watching now

None of this happens by accident. It takes a deliberate habit of asking, over and over, what you did yesterday that you shouldn’t be doing tomorrow. Most people never ask. They’re too busy doing. And the irony is the busier you are, the more of your day is probably the kind of work you could give away.

So I’ll leave you with the same uncomfortable question. Look back at yesterday. Find the hour a machine could have run without you. Then go and build the thing that runs it — and free yourself up for the work that actually needs a human in the chair.