Something Cameron Adams, co-founder of Canva, said this week has been running through my head. He said the quiet part out loud: as AI makes everyone “good,” judgment is what separates the greats.

He was talking about design. I think he was describing you.

A version of this fear shows up in almost every strategy session I run. An executive with 20 plus years in finance, pharma, consulting, law or tech will tell me they are worried their expertise is getting commoditized. Every junior hire can run Claude. Every recent MBA is fluent in ChatGPT. The tools that took them decades to master are now a USD 20 subscription.

Underneath that fear is a deeper one. If the work I used to do is no longer scarce, am I?

The Stanford 2026 AI Index released this month has a number in it that I keep coming back to. Seventy-three percent of AI experts expect AI to make work better. Twenty-three percent of the general public agree. That is a fifty point gap in sentiment between people who actually use AI daily and everyone else.

Your clients and your prospects are reading the same headlines as the broader public. They are sitting in the twenty-three percent. You are in the seventy-three.

Adams said it this way.

“When anyone can produce something polished, what separates the work is the thinking behind it. Judgement and empathy become more important. The strength of the idea, the sensitivity to context, the instinct about what will resonate.”

Translate that out of design and into your world.

AI can draft the memo. It cannot tell the PE-backed CEO that the memo is technically right and politically fatal. AI can redline the contract. It cannot read the room in a board meeting and know which three clauses are worth dying on the hill for. AI can produce a valuation model. It cannot sit across from a founder and know which number is honest and which one the founder is still lying to himself about.

That instinct is what clients pay a premium for. Always have, always will. What has changed is that the execution layer, the part clients used to pay you USD 400 an hour for, is being done by AI agents in the background. The part that stays scarce is yours.

Here is what I want you to do this week.

Take the last client or prospect conversation you had. Write down, specifically, what you told them that they could not have gotten from an AI tool on its own. The judgment call. The “actually, the real issue is…” moment. The thing you said that only twenty years of watching this pattern could have surfaced.

That moment is your offer. Everything else is packaging around it.

Most senior professionals I work with are pricing the wrong thing. They are pricing the deliverable, the report, the project. What the client is actually paying for is the ten seconds in the meeting where you said something nobody else in the room could have said. Build your package around that and the rest of your positioning writes itself.

Your twenty years of pattern recognition are worth more in 2026 than they were in 2024, not less. The AI gave everyone else an execution layer. It did not give them your read of the room.

The senior professionals I see winning right now are the ones who stopped apologising for their experience and started pricing it. AI agents handle the delivery. Their judgment runs the relationship. That is the practice worth building, and that is the one clients are actively looking for.

Salama

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PS: If this hit close to home and you want to talk through how to price your judgment into a premium offer, I set aside time each week for 15-minute strategy sessions. Apply here.