AEC's next competitive advantage isn't expertise; it's how fast you unlock it.
I know AI has been written about extensively in these pages, but this isn’t another “here’s how to use AI in your business” tutorial. This is about something happening deeper under the surface, a shift I haven’t been able to ignore.
And it was a single quote from Raoul Pal, author and global macro investor, that snapped it into focus for me: “AI is the single greatest innovation of humanity – ever. The only thing that comes close is the splitting of the atom.”
He didn't say it for shock value. He said it because for the first time in human history, something foundational has changed: Knowledge is no longer scarce.
Pal takes it further. He argues that we've created infinite knowledge with the dawn of AI, and when something becomes infinite, its value collapses. Knowledge, he says, is becoming like water: abundant, essential, but no longer a source of competitive advantage on its own.
That should at least make every firm leader in AEC stop and think.
For decades, our entire business model has been built on knowledge scarcity. We charge for expertise. We hire people who've accumulated years of experience. We protect what we know because knowing it first, knowing it better, or knowing it at all is what makes us valuable.
But if knowledge becomes free, truly free, then what are we selling?
The answer isn't "nothing." But it is different. And firms that don't see the shift coming won't just lose market share. They'll lose their entire economic foundation.
In a world of infinite knowledge, the real product isn’t what you know; it’s how well your people think, decide, lead, and turn information into action.
This isn't a warning about someday. It's happening now.
What “knowledge scarcity” really means
When people hear that, they think it means we were gatekeeping. It's not that at all. Knowledge scarcity means information used to be limited by time, access, and experience.
Why are lawyers so expensive? Knowledge scarcity. Why do hedge fund managers earn massive commissions? Knowledge scarcity.
If you wanted to understand the nuances of project delivery, permitting, QA/QC, pursuit strategy, or hydraulic modeling, you had to either work next to someone who knew it or spend years accumulating the same hard lessons.
That wasn't a flaw. That was the fundamental structure of expertise. Scarcity is what made experience valuable. You couldn't copy it. You couldn't accelerate it. You couldn't download it. But AI is doing something no technology has ever done before: It’s dissolving the walls around information at a breakneck speed.
It didn't replace expertise; it removed the natural barriers that used to control access to it.
For the first time, knowledge isn't rationed. It's abundant. Even if you are still just an AI dabbler, you can access information and creative nudges in the blink of an eye.
AEC isn't built for abundant knowledge
This is where the caution comes in. AEC is an apprenticeship-driven industry. We're built on hierarchy, memory, mentorship, and “just ask around, someone here has done it before.”
When knowledge was scarce, that made perfect sense. But when knowledge becomes abundant, our traditional systems start cracking:
- We overload the same three subject matter experts because we never captured what they knew.
- We onboard people by pointing at a cloud server maze, hoping they get lucky.
- We depend on tribal wisdom that lives in email archives and project folders from 2014.
- We evaluate staff based on how long they've been around rather than how well they use information.
Here's what that looks like in practice: At Wooten, we recognized this early. When a new PM asked, "How do we handle this?" the answer used to be, "Go ask Janet" or, "Check the folder from that 2019 project."
So we built an innovative system that captures institutional knowledge and makes it accessible on demand. Not a static manual that gets outdated. Not another SharePoint document library graveyard. A living resource that gets smarter the more we use it.
Now, when someone needs to know how we approach QA/QC on a waterline project or what our lessons learned were on that tricky stormwater permit, the answer is there. Instantly. Consistently.
That's knowledge abundance in action. And it changes everything about how fast people ramp up, how consistently we deliver, and how much time our senior staff gets back to dig into other priorities.
None of that scales in a post-scarcity world.
The danger isn't that AI will replace humans, as many people assert. The danger is that firms will cling to structures built for a world that no longer exists.
What actually changes, and what doesn't
When knowledge becomes free:
- Context becomes cheap.
- Information becomes fast.
- Insight becomes democratized.
- Junior staff ramp up faster.
- Mid-career staff make better decisions.
- Senior staff stop drowning in avoidable questions.
But here's the part that truly matters: Judgment doesn't become free. Strong leadership doesn't become free. Creativity doesn't become free. Wisdom doesn't become free.
AI collapses the information gap. It doesn't collapse the wisdom gap. Our value doesn't disappear. It shifts upward. And that's where the real opportunity is.
My optimistic reality
I’ve been all-in since the beginning. If firms embrace this shift, we get something remarkable: better decisions, faster learning, fewer bottlenecks, and more meaningful human-to-human work. We get more time spent on strategy, risk, clarity, and leadership, and less time spent rewriting, reformatting, re-explaining, and reinventing wheels.
AI becomes the floor, not the ceiling.
I believe it should be used to do the heavy lifting so we can finally do the higher-order work we always wanted more time for, like finally executing that dust-covered strategic plan you spent so much time developing.
And the uncomfortable truth
If firms ignore this shift, if they treat AI like a side project or a passing fad, the outcome is predictable.
We have survived recessions, pandemics, consolidations, and labor shortages, but this current shift touches the very foundation of how firms operate.
The AEC industry is notoriously slow to change. The gap between the firms that adapt and the firms that don't will widen quietly at first, and then brutally.
Because when knowledge is abundant, everything shifts. Speed matters more than it used to. Clarity becomes the advantage. Innovation stops being optional, and you need a culture strong enough to handle all that change.
And firms that rely on "the way we've always done it" will feel like they're walking through mud while everyone else is skiing downhill.
Scarcity protected us for decades. Abundance won’t give us the same luxury. I’m confident AI won't kill AEC firms. But refusing to evolve might.
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Kraig Kern, CPSM is the innovation and integration lead at The Wooten Company. Contact him at kkern@thewootencompany.com. |