AI: Rise of the Intangible Assets

 

In a recent podcast where Simon Sinek interviewed Ethan Mollick, they discussed how your greatest asset will be your humanity. "In a world where everyone uses AI, this creates an echo chamber of unoriginal ideas."

When AI was first in its infant stages of adoption, AI-produced work stood out from the rest. But with mass adoption, AI work has become unoriginal and indistinguishable from others.

So how do you set yourself apart from the "echo chamber of unoriginal ideas"? The simple answer is: be human. Focus on producing well-executed outputs, that  naturally carry the fingerprints of work that is unique to you. This will be your competitive advantage — your edge.

In my opinion, AI will give rise to a very precious commodity: intangible assets. Tim Sanders wrote that success in the future will be based on "fuzzy intangibles" — when discussing notions, processes for managing technology, ideas, and products can be copied easily, but the intangibles that make you *you* are infinitely more difficult to replicate.

 Examples of Intangible Assets

Integrity— Doing the right thing even when no one is watching. AI can generate a policy document, but it can't force you to uphold it. 

Tenacity — The willingness to stay with a hard problem past the point where it stops being fun. 

Ability to solve problems across different contexts and scenarios — Real-world problems rarely arrive in the tidy format they were trained on. Humans can take a principle learned in one context and apply it in a completely unrelated one. AI can do this to a degree, but can miss the nuances in each situation. 

Judgement and discernment (the wisdom to apply knowledge) — Knowing something is different from knowing when and how to use it. AI can hand you information, only judgement tells you how to apply it. 

Resilience — The ability to handle setbacks when things do not go your way or disaster strikes. 

Emotional intelligence — how well can you processes, regulates, and appropriately respond to emotions. While AI can recognise emotional cues, it does not genuinely experience emotions and relationships. 

Intuition ("gut feel") — It's built from years of accumulated, embodied experience — not something that can be prompted into existence. Those with religious beliefs also believe that this intuition can be a divine influence. 

Human interaction -  Perceiving emotions and applying the correct response. Not just detecting that someone emotions, but knowing what the right response is. 

Reputation - This can only be created through of consistent actions where your words and actions match. No prompt inputted in AI can produce reputation. 

Business examples

Southwest Airlines

A plane ticket is a plane ticket — routes, fares, and aircraft can all be matched. What's harder to copy is Southwest's culture. The airline has long been known for hiring on personality and service ethos as much as experience, and that shows up in small ways: friendlier staff, more flexibility, a lighter touch. It's built the brand real loyalty in an industry where the product itself is basically identical everywhere.

Costco

Costco sells the same categories of goods as any big-box retailer. What sets it apart is trust. It's known for keeping margins low and paying staff above the retail average, and customers notice — it's part of why Costco has one of the most loyal membership bases in retail. A competitor could copy the warehouse format tomorrow. Copying a decades-long reputation for fair dealing is a different problem.

In both cases, the product is replicable. The intangible asset of culture and trust is unqiue and more difficult to copy. 

Closing

Intangibles assets have always been valuable, but AI these more valuable because they are becoming more scarce. 

So the question worth sitting with is this: if AI can replicate your output by next year, what's left of you that it can't?