Money Isn’t Created — It Just Changes Hands
Let’s start with a bit of economic context. It might help us better understand what’s actually going on. It can also sharpen our critical thinking — which is no small thing in the face of the overwhelming media noise around AI, often amplified in a rather careless way (too many people talking without really knowing what they’re talking about?).
Money isn’t created: it just changes hands. It’s a basic principle of capitalism, like it or not. Money doesn’t appear out of thin air; it doesn’t get “generated.” It circulates — someone loses while someone else gains. A typical zero-sum game. That’s why creating wealth, in this context, ultimately means taking margin away from someone else.
The Growing Difficulty of Creating Wealth Through Differentiation
Once we accept that money simply changes hands, we can add the second layer to the logic: it’s getting harder and harder to stand out through your product, service, or delivered experience alone. And that directly clashes with the core objective of any business: building a sustainable competitive advantage. If it’s not sustainable, it’s not an advantage. And without advantage, the market levels out… Are we really going to slap each other silly with price drops, while the low-cost giants wait to pounce?
For years, companies have bet on differentiation through unique products, extraordinary services, or unforgettable experiences. But this strategy now faces two major challenges:
- Accelerated replicability: Creating something unique is great — unless it can be copied. Unless you can protect that differentiation with things like patents… But just like in Jurassic Park, “life finds a way,” and so does replication.
- Shifting value axis: Competitive advantage no longer hinges solely on the product, service, or experience — it’s about your ability to build a compelling concept and a narrative around your brand. And that narrative needs sustained investment before it even starts to stick in people’s minds.
“Differentiation stopped revolving exclusively around the product, service or experience a long time ago. It now lives in the brand’s ability to create a concept, and the narrative it’s able to build around it.”
But that doesn’t happen overnight. Building a strong narrative — building a brand that connects — takes talent, investment, and most of all: time. Three things that rarely align with today’s sense of urgency. And let’s be honest, they’ll never align with shareholder urgency — they want to hear about today’s dividends.
AI as the Shortcut: Cost Reduction and Process Optimization
So in the meantime, what’s left? Cut costs. Optimize processes. Raise margins by lowering expenses. That simple. That blunt. Nothing new in a free-market economy.
And that’s exactly where AI fits in today — just like automation and digitalization did in previous decades, by reducing human capital through technological progress. Now, AI — in its most basic form — is simply the next vehicle for achieving efficiency. Yesterday it was automation, integrated platforms, and mechanized processes. Today it’s AI. And no, it wasn’t designed to write fairy tales, generate cool avatars, or help your kids with math. It was designed to reduce costs. Across the board. In production, customer acquisition, relationship management, and decision-making.
The media noise is deafening: “AI will only replace those who don’t learn to use it.” That’s simply false. AI will replace anything that can be replaced — regardless of how skilled the person currently doing it is. What gets replaced are processes — processes that, in most cases, are carried out by people. Its purpose is to ensure equal (or better) productivity than a human, at a fraction of the cost, and with an efficiency that outpaces human limits.
Practical Example: Cold Emailing Platforms in B2B Sales
A clear example of AI’s cost-cutting and process-optimizing potential is the rise of cold outreach and prospecting platforms in B2B sales. Traditionally, sales teams would spend hours identifying leads, writing personalized emails, and manually following up. Today, AI multiplies this process exponentially — without any apparent loss in conversion quality.
How these platforms work:
- Advanced segmentation: Algorithms that identify potential customers with high precision.
- Automated personalization: AI-generated emails that mimic human tone and writing style.
- Send-time optimization: AI tweaks timing and format to maximize response rates.
- Conversion analytics: Constant learning from data to improve effectiveness.
- Clone analysis: Machine learning capabilities that allow pattern matching to find new lookalike leads.
The promise is tempting: human-level conversion rates, but at massively higher volumes — allowing companies to scale prospecting with minimal investment.
Did anyone think we’d ditch some strategies altogether? Cold calling — widely criticized, never dead — still thrives. Its essence hasn’t changed: interruptive outreach. What has changed is the cost structure and the promise of better results through AI-fueled automation. The process gets technical. It gets automated. But the core activity (knocking on cold doors) remains intact.
Adaptation, Replacement, Confrontation: A Sterile Debate?
It’s not about whether AI will replace jobs. That’s why it was created — just like fridges were created to keep things cold. It’s already replacing jobs. It will continue to do so. That’s the whole point: to substitute tasks, automate processes, eliminate friction. And yes, that includes amortizing (sorry for the euphemism) human roles. For big tech corporations, few things are more inconvenient than unions — aside from regulation.
We’ll keep hearing a lot about adaptation, and it makes sense. As individuals, our role is dual: we must learn how to use AI, while simultaneously accepting that we’re passive subjects in terms of influence and impact. That’s why the real battle is going to play out at the regulatory level.
Meanwhile, money — once again — will simply change hands.
