Professionals have long-created their businesses around their talents for many years.
Educators created sales around instructional products, while consultants provided niche knowledge and expertise, coaches offered tested models of success and course creators provided structured learning experiences.
The introduction of AI dramatically shifted the game.
As an example, using ChatGPT, you can clarify complicated concepts, respond to everyone's questions, generate examples, summarise information from long pieces of content, and generate resources with relative ease and virtually instantly!
Thus, it has caused educators to be faced with perhaps the biggest question that is facing educators today:
What happens when AI learns everything I teach?
While it may seem alarming that AI is becoming capable of delivering our methodologies, processes, and lessons, leading one to question why anyone would want to invest in our courses or coaching programs, the truth is much more nuanced than that.
With AI being able to deliver information more effectively than before, the value of that information will be reduced. However, this may end up increasing the values of the expertise, implementation, trust, and transformation we provide.
The future of education does not include keeping knowledge from AI; it is about understanding what AI will never replace.
AI Is Turning Knowledge into a Commodity
Historically speaking, information has been hard to come by where experts were valuable due to their skills being difficult to gain access to; there were few books, hard-to-find mentors and there were significant amounts of money and time needed for professional training.
However, that is no longer the case. Now all it takes is typing a few keys on your keyboard to access an AI assistant to help you with a wide variety topics — for example, developing a marketing plan, improving your leadership skills, creating a website, preparing for an interview and building an online course.
Therefore, what used to take hours of research or learning via a specialist is now providing you with a complete and detailed answer in seconds. With the rapid enhancement of artificial intelligence and the quantity and quality of educational content available to you immediately increasing, it is causing basic information to become a commodity and fundamentally changing what knowledge is worth.
This transformational shape of education is similar to the evolvement of the calculator; as soon as math became accessible to everyone, society began to value higher-order problem solving instead of basic math skills; and this is happening now with education where the question has changed from,
“Can I give you information?”
To
“Can I help you get results?”
Information and Transformation Are Not the Same Thing
Many think that the availability of information via AI is equal to having an expert in that subject. Knowing something and doing something are two different types of skill sets altogether. Even though ChatGPT may give you the ability to develop a detailed workout plan or offer nutrition suggestions to help you achieve your health and fitness goals, millions of others are still unable to achieve those same goals due to a lack of sustained action. Gaining access to information may be easy with AI, but ultimately the motivation to transform the knowledge gained through AI into sustained action is up to the individual.
The same pattern exists throughout business and leadership as well as all forms of communication, writing, selling, and personal development; many adults know what they should do, but they cannot seem to take action in the way that they want or need to.
Creating a gap between the knowledge gained by using AI and the ability to take action creates opportunities for teachers. Whether through the use of AI in schools or otherwise; humans often need assistance getting from instructions created by AI to maintaining those actions consistently. Therefore, in order for true transformation to happen, there needs to be more than just information providing through AI, there also needs to be; anno (accountability, feedback, motivational support, contextual support, and experienced support).
AI Can Explain Frameworks, But Not Personal Experience
A lot of people are concerned that AI will take over and make teachers obsolete because AI will take all the framework(s) that are currently used by educators; however, to be a true expert requires more than just using a framework(s). The most important element of being an expert is what you learned (realized/listened) from your own experiences by going through struggles and facing obstacles.
When you have years of experience as a coach, you have learned how to theorize to coach based on your experience.
Not only will AI be able to provide the basics of how an effective negotiation process should be done, but there are consultants who have hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars that were lost by clients due to the mistakes made in negotiating.
A lot of what you learn in your practice and through your experience is developed over time—with years and years of trial and error.
Details of a consultant's story about one of their clients nearly losing a million-dollar project are filled with many things that cannot be conveyed solely through generic advice. This demonstrates how human experience triumphs over AI - in terms of details, context, and the experience of actual reactions.
Also, while AI can provide education on communication theory, managers are able to provide information on how they dealt with difficult situations or conversations that resulted in several members of their team almost resigning.
The nuance and emotional intelligence from a manager's perspective through their experience of resolving sensitive matters amongst their team can be incredibly valuable when trying to comprehend an AI explanation.
By establishing a setting for the issues being addressed through stories, managers allow for better judgement leading to improved decision-making.
Judgement will lead to improved decisions.
The practical knowledge gained from these stories cannot easily be replicated through informational content alone.
The future will belong to those that can leverage widespread content into real change by using creativity and insight to interpret, apply and modify information.
The New Competitive Advantage Is Perspective
In the age of AI-generated content being everywhere, having unique perspectives is now more important than ever.
While thousands of people might ask ChatGPT the same question and get back similar responses, they won’t have access to your viewpoint on the subject: your experience, your methods, your observations, and how you go about solving problems.
For instance, two marketing professionals can use the same principles but achieve different results because their perspectives and methodology differ. That’s one reason why personal brands are still so strong: people don’t follow experts for information alone; they follow them for insights and interpretation as well.
Creatives with unique viewpoints will excel in the world of AI. Rather than competing on the sheer amount of information they have, they’ll compete on how they interpreted that data. The creatives who succeed won’t just tell you what to do; they’ll explain why it matters, when it works, and when it doesn’t.
Are Courses Becoming More Important?
At first blush, it seems counterintuitive; if artificial intelligence can teach anything, should all courses cease to exist? The answer is more complicated than that, however.
As such, the implementation of artificial intelligence may not render courses outdated, but instead increase their value. In many ways, a course provides what artificial intelligence doesn’t often provide: an organized structure and a pathway for real-world learners.
While researching information is easy for many people, the problem lies with how much information is available and being able to sort through that information to find out what each person needs to know. For example, artificial intelligence has the ability to provide thousands of suggestions in seconds. If a course has been designed correctly, it serves as a filter for complexity, or the confusing and illogical nature of many things we attempt to learn today. A course provides a logical flow of information from point A to point Z, with each piece of information building upon the previous one. Ultimately, the course will provide all necessary information while eliminating anything that will distract or confuse someone from learning the information needed for proper understanding at that time.
To put this another way, using AI to provide information is like using a large library to gather information. However, using a course correlates to using a tour guide to help find information in that library. Therefore, while both AI and a course can provide information; only one of them provides the user of that information with a thoughtfully designed experience for their learning.
Because of this, the emphasis for many educators is shifting from simply creating a large volume of content to developing thoughtful course designs. The greatest value of the future course creator will be assisting students in successfully implementing concepts taught.
The Experts Who Will Struggle
With the rapid growth of AI, not all professionals alike will have the same advantage. With AI providing access to information in real-time, professionals are losing the competitive advantage they had based on traditional models of providing basic information. Educators who provide content that can be generated quickly and easily by an AI (i.e., generic novice level courses, wide-ranging info products, or continuing education material) are becoming more likely to be unsuccessful at providing value to their target audience. If a learner can access a comparable level of information with an AI in a matter of seconds, learners will begin to rationalize that traditional methods are not necessarily the best option.
However, being unable to succeed as an educator does not mean these creators won't be able to succeed as they will need to make changes to their businesses in order to adapt. The strongest educators are in the process of redefining themselves as those who provide an outcome for their learners to achieve rather than just providing a level of information. In other words, strong educators will focus on outcomes of implementation, results and community participation rather than only on information and will be rebranding themselves based upon their specialized expertise, unique methods of delivery and proprietary methods. In addition, the marketplace for education will ultimately be about providing transformation and tangible impact versus just providing information.
The Experts Who Will Thrive
The educators who will thrive in an AI-dominated world are those who take the initiative to use artificial intelligence as a means of achieving their goals. In doing so, they can incorporate AI into their everyday lives by implementing it in course development, research, creating richer content, providing more effective support for students, and giving students personalized learning experiences.
The leaders who succeed in this new era will have succeeded in enhancing the human elements of education. They will do this through creating trust, developing leadership skills, mentoring, using emotional intelligence, showing strategic judgment, and building meaningful connections. When the capabilities of humans are enhanced through partnering with AI, the result of that enhancement will create synergy; that is, work that neither technology nor humans can create without the other.
Artificial Intelligence will not take over the work or expertise of those who know how to engage, motivate and empower people in an increasingly complicated world; in fact, it may raise the standard of what is considered "expertise" even higher.
Conclusion
When ChatGPT comprehensively learns what is taught to it, accessing information will take less effort than ever before. Consequently, there will be less intrinsic worth associated with basic knowledge, leading to a loss of market share for generic-learning products. However, true expertise will not vanish, but rather will transform.
Professionals who can mark their success based on producing measurable outcomes, providing accountability through mentoring, and delivering transformative learning through both experiential and personal support will be rewarded in this changing landscape. AI is transforming our learning processes, and it is simultaneously demonstrating the permanent and irreplaceable worth of human expertise; a value derived from both knowledge and the ability to create positive change.