I have been thinking about this a lot lately, and I am fully aware that I may sound hypocritical.
I use AI.
In fact, I use it almost every day.
Sometimes I use it to brainstorm ideas. Working remotely means I do not have someone sitting in the office next to me to bounce ideas off. Sometimes I use it to help organize my thoughts. Sometimes I use it to edit something I have already written. Although, if I am being honest, there are plenty of times when the edits create more work than if I had just left it alone.
AI is an incredible tool when it is used correctly.
What concerns me is how many people have started confusing AI-generated information with actual expertise.
Recently, I have been reviewing conference agendas and speaker applications, trying to decide which sessions I want to attend. The number of session descriptions that are obviously written by AI is astonishing. You can spot them almost immediately. They all sound the same. The same generic buzzwords. The same polished but empty language. The same promise that attendees will somehow transform their businesses, leadership, marketing, technology, or lives within a fifty-minute session.
The descriptions tell me absolutely nothing about why I should listen to that person.
More importantly, they tell me nothing about what that person has actually done.
When I attend a conference, I am not paying for information.
Information is free.
I can ask ChatGPT a question. I can search Google. I can watch a YouTube video. I can read a book.
What I cannot get from a search engine is your experience.
I want to hear about the mistakes you made.
I want to hear about the strategy that looked brilliant on paper and failed miserably in execution.
I want to hear what happened when the client left, the deal fell apart, the employee quit, the acquisition closed, or the process broke.
I want the lessons that came from actually doing the work.
The reality is that expertise has never been about information. Expertise comes from experience. It comes from years of testing ideas in the real world and dealing with the consequences. It comes from making decisions when there is no perfect answer. It comes from getting things wrong enough times to recognize patterns that someone else cannot see.
AI cannot give you that.
It can summarize others’ experiences, but it cannot replace having those experiences yourself.
What worries me even more is what happens when people start presenting themselves as experts based entirely on information they have never personally applied.
We are seeing it everywhere.
LinkedIn posts.
Newsletters.
Coaching programs.
Consulting offers.
Advisory services.
People are marketing themselves as experts in topics they have barely practiced because AI allows them to sound knowledgeable enough to attract attention.
That should concern all of us.
Not because those individuals are necessarily malicious, but because they are creating an environment where it becomes harder to distinguish genuine expertise from manufactured expertise.
Eventually, the people who truly need help stop trusting everyone.
The business owner looking for a coach becomes skeptical.
The entrepreneur looking for an advisor becomes cautious.
The conference attendee becomes cynical.
The audience starts assuming everyone is full of it.
That is unfair to the people who have spent years earning their expertise.
I know speakers who spend dozens of hours building original presentations. They gather case studies, share personal experiences, test ideas, refine examples, and invest enormous amounts of effort into creating something valuable for an audience.
When someone submits a generic AI-generated session proposal and secures a speaking slot, they are taking space that could have gone to someone who actually has something meaningful to teach.
That matters.
The same thing applies to advisors, consultants, and coaches.
If your entire value proposition can be replicated by a prompt, you do not have a value proposition.
The people I trust most are rarely the ones with the most polished content. They are the people who can tell me where they failed. They can explain why one solution worked in one situation but failed in another. They can answer the follow-up questions that are not covered in the script.
That only comes from experience.
I am not worried about AI replacing expertise.
I am worried about people forgetting what expertise actually is.
AI should amplify your knowledge, not replace it.
It should help you communicate your ideas, not become your ideas.
It should make your experience easier to share, not eliminate the need to have experience in the first place.
The technology will continue to improve. That much is certain.
What I hope we do not lose along the way is our own voice.
Because the most valuable thing any of us has to offer is not information. We are surrounded by information.
The most valuable thing we have to offer is perspective.
That perspective comes from years of successes, failures, bad decisions, good decisions, and lessons learned the hard way.
No prompt can generate that.
It has to be earned.
