A friend of mine and former fierce competitor in the tech industry, Christopher Lochhead, is a founder and principle in Category Pirates. His firm produces fantastic content related to the topic of category creation (one of the tenets of “market engineering” that I preach). I’m a huge fan.
One of their recent posts was one of their best. It introduced the notion of “Creation Capitalism” – https://www.categorypirates.news/p/creator-capital-its-time-to-transition. I encourage you to read it: the summary thesis is that the “knowledge worker is dead”. With AI, knowledge is cheap and available 24/7/365, anywhere. Future job opportunities are for the “creator capitalists” – people who are able to use AI to create something new and of value that no one else can develop.
This leads me to consider the first value inflection point on the Traction Gap Framework: Ideation. Many of us have had ideas. They are – as many have said – “a dime a dozen”. But, ideas are the fuel of the creative process. Most of us at one time or another have identified a business problem or a consumer issue we believe should be solved.
However, 99% of us stop at “Ideation” because taking that idea from a thought to a full-fledged invention/business has been thwarted by an enormous barrier; lack of knowledge. Where do we get the capital? Who can build it? Who can help market and sell it? Most of us simply don’t know how convert what might be a brilliant idea into reality (absent going on Shark Tank or being bff with someone at Sequoia Capital!).
AI changes this. With AI, the lack of personal knowledge won’t be the barrier it once was. If anyone can ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, etc. to help convert and develop an idea into a comprehensive plan and/or product – development, financial, go-to-market – then “knowledge workers” will be replaced with “creator capitalists” – the people who can come up with interesting ideas and can harness AI (not code it!) to transform those ideas into reality.
I’ve spent the last week taking one of my ideas and turning it into a full-fledged software application using Replit (I could have used Lovable or something else). What would have taking me a few months, has taken just a week or so to get to a Beta application and I didn’t need to hire one of my engineer friends to help. The last time I coded anything of value was in Fortran! All it took for me to do this was to take my personal insight and the willingness to guide Replit along.
Christopher and his team are right – the knowledge worker is dead. Long live the capitalist creator.