The Great Weeding Out: Why Real Expertise Is Worth More in the AI Era (Not Less)

TL;DR: Everyone assumes the AI era means a race to the bottom for coaches and experts — cheaper, faster, everyone undercutting everyone. The opposite is happening. The people with real depth are charging more than they ever have. AI is a generalist that removes friction and expands the pool of people ready for mastery-level help — while leaving the deep end wide open. If you have genuine expertise, this is your era. Here's how to position for it.

A few pieces back I made the case that AI isn't replacing humans — it's the opposite. (If you haven't read that one, start there.) Now let me bring it home to my own field, because if you're a coach or an expert who sells what you know, there's a story going around that's dead wrong: that AI means a race to the bottom. Lower your prices, over-deliver, or get replaced.

Here's what I actually see: every single expert I know with real positioning is charging more than they ever have — and their most loyal people are paying more than ever, too. If you're competing to be the cheapest right now, you're misreading the moment.

The great weeding out

When ChatGPT first emerged, I called what was coming "the great weeding out." Here's what I meant.

There have always been two very different lanes. On one side: hype generalists, one-trick ponies, and community-and-accountability folks — often low-ticket, high-volume. Paid communities, subscriber groups, twelve-dollar-a-month rooms where people show up to do digital coworks together. And I want to be clear: there's real merit there. That human, keep-you-activated, keep-you-accountable element is genuinely attractive and it drives retention. If that's the room, it's a valid, thriving lane.

On the other side: precision and mastery — people who've gone deep and invested mightily to develop expertise. That's my lane. Not the surface-level, one-move zone of genius, but the deep technical, cross-domain kind.

What AI weeds out isn't either of those real lanes. It weeds out the mushy middle — the shallow generalist who was neither a great community-builder nor a true master. Both real lanes survive. The danger is being stuck between them.

AI is a generalist — which leaves the deep end wide open

Here's the key thing to understand about AI: it's a generalist. It's trained like a concierge — "what do you need, let me help you find it." You can add skills, connect tools, feed it files. But by and large, it's built to go wide, not deep.

And that leaves an enormous amount of room for deep, mastery-level precision. AI can help with breadth; it can't replicate a decade of hard-won depth in a specific domain.

But — and this is the part experts miss — AI being a generalist is good news for you, not bad. Because a generalist removes a ton of the friction that used to stop people from ever advancing far enough to need a master. So many people were simply overwhelmed and stuck. Now a twenty-dollar-a-month tool gives them a first taste of clarity and direction when they had none — it gets them one real step forward instead of frozen. Hold that thought, because it's the engine of the whole thesis.

The 1% is expanding — fast

Precision-positioned experts used to serve something like the top 1% — the people with enough knowledge and ability to even know they needed deep help. Everyone below that line was stuck in the friction.

AI is changing that. Think of it as an incubator, or a prep school. It removes the obstacles that held people well below that 1% line — enhancing both their knowledge and their ability to execute. Which means the pool of people ready to "graduate" into needing mastery-level help is expanding radically. AI gets them past their blockades and puts them in exactly the position where they need the deeper answer — the one AI can't give them — to unlock the next thing that used to feel unreachable.

So the 1% isn't shrinking. It's growing. And it's feeding straight toward experts with real depth.

Why AI can't touch mastery

Why can't AI just be the master? Because real mastery is too much context for a model to hold, let alone synthesize. It's the cross-domain pattern recognition, the ability to see the parallel from one field and apply it in another, the critical thinking, judgment, discernment, and intuition that come from lived experience solving hard problems. AI will never achieve that. The data agrees, by the way — PwC's analysis of over a billion job ads found judgment-heavy work growing twice as fast and paying 42% more wage growth than the automatable kind. The market is pricing depth up.

The two layers of specificity

Now, precision alone isn't enough. Because people already have a generalist — it's AI. What they need is an expert focused on precision and on them specifically. We call it the two layers of specificity: (1) who you work with, and (2) how you serve them.

People want to be in the room where they get an answer that applies directly to them — not a generic answer they then have to go figure out how to apply. That's the whole difference between what AI gives them and what you give them. Niche down. Get specific on both layers. That's what makes you the obvious choice instead of a nicer version of the free tool they already have.

Bolt onto the high-speed train

Here's the unlock that's actually driving the higher prices: pair your expertise with AI execution.

Build your offer so it brings the client's own AI into the fold. Hand them the action items from a coaching call in a form their AI thought partner can help them execute. Or go further and build a tool that plugs your frameworks and methodology into their AI directly — we built one that lets our clients run our marketing methodology through their own AI assistant, so they're not stuck attending a training and then trying to figure out how to apply it alone.

The generalist AI can take your specialist knowledge and help the client apply it at the speed AI already runs. You're not fighting the thousand-mile-an-hour train — you're bolting your flag onto it. Precision plus speed of execution creates a velocity that's almost impossible to replicate, and simply wasn't possible before.

That's why people pay more now. They're not white-knuckling for three years to see an outcome — they see one in an afternoon. You do the call, hand off the takeaways, they upload it to their AI, and off they go. The thing they'd have sat on for two months? Done thirty minutes after the call. You've bridged the gap between what an expert delivers and what a client actually has the bandwidth to execute — and that gap used to be massive. Close it, and you become indispensable. That's a loyalty that runs deeper than anything I've built before.

What I'm actually seeing

I've had clients I genuinely thought were about to leave. They did the opposite — they doubled down. Some even left their generalist coaches to work with me, precisely because I was more precision-oriented and mastery-focused. That's the sweet spot. And here's the beautiful part: more people rising to the level of needing mastery input means more opportunity for everyone to serve at their own unique level. This isn't zero-sum.

The mistake: mastery-level people still competing on price

Here's the most common error I see. Someone reaches a genuine mastery level — and then keeps competing on price. They don't understand the game they're actually playing. They see AI take the middle, panic into doom-and-gloom, lowball their pricing, and end up underpaid and over-servicing — burning out while delivering premium value at discount rates.

If you've chosen the lane of mastery: stop. Precision and mastery are rewarded with premium pricing — especially when you can help clients execute and deliver at speeds they've never hit before. Give yourself permission to charge what the transformation is worth. The worker deserves their wages; charging appropriately isn't greed, it's honoring the value you actually provide — and, honestly, it's what lets you keep showing up at your best for the people you serve.

Pick your lane — and own it

One caution: don't force yourself to be a mastery person if that's not who you are. If you're the connector, the host, the accountability-and-energy person who loves holding a room and running great events but doesn't want to dig deep and ruminate on hard problems — be that. Own it. That lane is real and it's valid.

The point isn't "everyone go high-ticket." The point is: now more than ever, pick your room, pick your lane, and stay in it. Lean into who you are, not who you're not. That clarity is the whole game.

How to actually raise your prices (the short version)

If you're precision-positioned and stuck competing in the middle, here's the high-level move — I'll do a full breakdown on the art of raising prices in a future piece, because it deserves one.

Don't just jack up prices without a plan. Do it as a transition built on real value:

• Reward the people who've been with you. Give your long-time clients a genuine last-chance window to lock in at current rates.
• Justify it with actual value you've added — not manufactured increases. For us, we built a beautiful new community app and a tool that connects to our clients' own AI to help them execute at levels they couldn't have dreamed of before. The price increase was clearly tied to real, new value — and staying meant keeping access to something that had become indispensable.
• Then set the new rate going forward.

That approach rewards loyalty and retention, gives you a natural promotion moment, and — most importantly — keeps it honest. Real value, real reasons. Not pressure tactics.

The bigger picture: this is an era of abundance

Let me leave you where I actually am on this, because it's the opposite of doom-and-gloom. Coaching is exploding — the profession nearly doubled from about $2.85 billion to $5.34 billion between 2023 and 2025 (ICF/PwC), the exact window AI went mainstream. I don't see it slowing down. I think AI is going to catalyze opportunity like never before.

Friction is what held us back — and friction is being removed. Here's my honest estimate (someone's probably measured it): most of us spend 80–90% of our time on work we don't even enjoy, aren't uniquely good at, and that isn't really in our zone. AI is handing that time back. It's freeing you to use your God-given abilities on the work that actually matters — the work only you can do.

So own the season we're in. Play the game you were built to play. If you're wired for precision and mastery, position yourself accordingly, give yourself permission to charge what it's worth — and ignore the noise telling you to race to the bottom.