As intelligence becomes commoditized, it's context—and specifically unique context—that acts as the ultimate differentiator. But this valuable context will not be gleaned from the presenter slides at an industry conference. It will come from the sidebar conversations in between sessions, the skeptics' reads of a panelist's body language, and the loose lips from the person who drank too much at the happy hour.
This new context will not be picked up by your Granola recorder or your Meta glasses. That's because these conversations will never make it into the public internet or generalized LLMs.
Investors have always looked for this unique information, known as "alpha" or "edge." This edge has always been hard to find in the digital world. Humans used to build algorithms to scrape public data sets—but it's become even harder to pull fresh insights from these troves, as swarms of agents patrol every possible data source seeking novelty.
Now it's our agent overlords asking humans to bring them as many unique insights as possible, so that they can produce truly differentiated insights. When the humans are sent off on this assignment, they'll need to tap into information that is unavailable to the masses.
Humans will need to bring more people into their orbits and create differentiated "pools" of insights. Rounds of golf will become reconnaissance missions, and the funniest person at the mixer will go home with the best gems of insight instead of more LinkedIn connections.
We'll become the new collectors of AI context—and the person with the best access will gather the best context.
