“Wisdom is worth more than silver; it makes you much richer than gold. Wisdom is more valuable than precious jewels; nothing you want compares with her.”
That’s from the Book of Proverbs and it’s been rattling around in my head all week as I watch company after company announce layoffs because AI is “more efficient.”
Here’s what I find interesting about this rush to replace people with technology.
Every one of these businesses is looking at AI and asking the same question: how many people can we get rid of? They’re racing to cut headcount because someone on a conference stage told them that AI can do the work of ten employees and their board got excited about the margin improvement.
But that’s not wisdom. That’s following the herd off a cliff while calling it strategy.
Ask a different question and you get a completely different outcome.
Instead of how many people can we cut, ask what happens to our output if we keep every single person and arm them with AI tools that multiply what they can do?
One company fires half its team and gets the same output with fewer people.
Congratulations, you’ve maintained the status quo with a smaller workforce and lost a decade of institutional knowledge in the process.
The other company keeps everyone and gives them AI that doubles their capacity. Now you have the same team producing twice the output, serving clients at a level your competitors who just gutted their workforce can’t touch, and building something an investor looks at and immediately understands the value of.
One is racing to the bottom on cost. The other is racing to the top on capability.
Proverbs got it right a few thousand years ago. Wisdom is worth more than silver and gold because it’s the thing that tells you when everyone else is running in the wrong direction.
Which direction are you running?
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George Sotiropoulos challenges the trend of companies firing workers to implement AI, arguing that keeping employees and enhancing their output with AI tools creates far more business value than cutting headcount. Using a passage from Proverbs on wisdom, he contrasts racing to the bottom on cost with racing to the top on capability and frames the decision through an investor lens