Why Expertise Is the New Currency

 

You are what you do-at least to the world that interacts with you. They value you for the value you provide them with or bring to their lives. This has been true since the earliest times when people bartered their skills to make their lives easier and better collectively.

We live in an unprecedented era where AI is taking over the jobs and professions of more and more people, leaving them to figure out what to do for a living. What is it that people will employ them for? As always, it is their expertise, the caveat being that they possess what AI cannot offer.

Any individual or business would like to tap into the creative imagination, unique skills, experience and specialist expertise of talented and empowered individuals. These are people who can help tackle hitherto intractable problems. In a universe that swears by AI and Big Data, cutting-edge information, knowledge and expertise can empower you like nothing else. It is the new currency of our times.

According to PWC, 23% of CEOs worldwide think that the availability of workers who possess key skills is a threat to growth. That is the reason why employees consider an upskilling opportunity to be the major factor behind their decision to continue their association with their employer. Expertise comes from knowledge, so it follows that knowledge itself could be viewed as currency. Knowledge helps you deal with challenges by empowering you to adapt and adjust to an ever changing, and  ever dynamic environment,  thereby allowing you to identify and capitalise on opportunity upon opportunity. Expertise created from knowledge helps add value to your resume like nothing else does.

Expertise to Power the Creative Economy

The advent of the creator economy brought about by the internet revolution is a wonderful thing. It demolished gatekeepers and allowed anybody who thought they had something to pitch or present to people easy and unimpeded access to the latter. But with managing to attract attention turning out to be the centrepoint of this ecosystem, the really meritorious people could sometimes not earn as much as they deserved.

There is no dearth of content on the internet, especially in the wake of a slew of GenAI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini. This has made people place a premium on expertise earned through real experience and knowledge- something that can help address real people’s real problems and issues. Because expertise is difficult to come by, it is valued all the more.

People who have proven expertise will lead the charge for the creator economy, henceforth. Now is the time to establish your credentials as a bona fide creator in a specific category or niche. Those who do that will be able to cash in on their skills and scale up their business model or enhance their employability in a major way.

Skills and Expertise Trump All

More than your qualifications, it is your demonstrable skills that will determine your usefulness to businesses across industries. Skills and expertise are the new in-demand currency that opens pathways to opportunity. They help you navigate the uncertainties of a dynamic environment in a resilient manner.

Is it any wonder then that the global e-learning market is expected to reach more than $400 billion this year? Given that 39% of workers’ current skill sets are likely to be in need of change and transformation if not become redundant by 2030, the importance of updating your skills cannot be understated.

The way that the internet has replaced the old system of earning access in order to progress with a free-wheeling one with an evolving code of conduct, you are often not sure of getting your rightful due. That era is coming to an end, and we are in the throes of the unfolding of the era of expertise. Do you have it in you to thrive in it?

Why Every CEO Needs a Personal Brand in the AI Age

There are several reasons why the personal brand is so valuable in the age of AI, the least of which is that a personal brand is several times more powerful than a business brand. As a human being, one connects better with another human on a primal level before one ever gets to fall in love with a product or a service. This is the reason why soldiers will perform better in battle under an inspirational commander than a lacklustre one. The same reason is why the skipper of a team sport like cricket or football often inspires their team to victory against seemingly impossible odds.

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The presence of social media has made it very easy for CEOs to connect with people on a personal and individual level, something the brand itself needs much time and effort to achieve. It is way easier for a CEO with a personal brand to lend his charisma to the brand than the other way around in today's times. It is this personal connection that brands crave in order to influence their target audience. This also explains why brands value influencers so much. They add an emotional connection to the outreach.

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Brands crave relatability with their target audience more than anything else, and a CEO’s personal brand can help them get just that. People trust people whom they relate to. That is something that no amount of advertising and other forms of paid promotion can easily create. If the CEO in his or her personal capacity wields the mojo when it comes to addressing the aspirations of the target audience of a business, they have hit the jackpot. That is because the CEO will get the business connections they seek at a fraction of the cost.

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The good news is that your personal brand as a CEO is easy to build. You don't have to be a media-savvy rock star. As discussed earlier, you have to be a relatable and real person with genuine  stories to share with people who know where you are coming from.

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The companies and brands which have seen revolutionary growth over the last thirty years or so have largely been led by people of tremendous courage of their convictions, possessing great personal brands. Everybody from Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk  had captured the minds and hearts of millions by sharing their seemingly grandiose dreams and making them approachable and achievable.

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With artificial intelligence automating all the repetitive tasks and increasingly taking on the mantle of decision making people will crave more and more for a steadying human voice which advises them in the manner of a friend they know well. This is where a CEO with a strong personal brand will be able to raise their business brand’s profile far above the mechanical clutter created by a super efficient world managed by soulless AI.

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As AI finds its way into more and more of our activities, humans will increasingly hark back to creativity, passion, connection, community, and vision to connect with the humans behind a business's products or services. AI may very well improve both products and services and their delivery, but it is the human connection that will make the customers loyal and stay.

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Using AI as an ally to build your personal brand as a CEO

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AI is here to stay and with good reason. It is not the villain to compete against, but the Ally who can help a CEO do better personal brand building. For instance, not everyone is a born writer and you as a CEO can surely use generative AI to draft content that helps you connect with your target audience, as long as it genuinely reflects your voice.

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AI tools can also help analyse vast amounts of data pertaining to your target audience in double quick time, giving you critical information to speak to their concerns on a personal level.

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Personal Brand as an exclusive club

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Finally we are reaching a stage where the personal brand of a dynamic CEO and their loyal followers will determine the success of a business. It will not be so much the product or the service that a business provides, but the values and aspirations that the CEO as a person displays that will draw his loyal followers, associates, fellow believers to buy what's on offer. Much like Trump has his MAGA supporters and Elon has his Tesla lovers. To take a sporting analogy die hard Beckham fans will buy merchandise of the football club he plays for, because he is there. Personal branding is the way to go for CEOs.

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How AI Is Reshaping PR Forever

Photo by Werner Pfennig: https://www.pexels.com/photo/an-elderly-man-having-an-interview-6950236/

 AI is transforming the scope and very nature of PR activity, imparting it a dynamism and urgency it didn’t have in the past. Thanks to it, communication is always on point, as it is data-driven, leading to much smarter campaigns and way better results than was possible in the past.

Public Relations as we knew it in the past no longer delivers in the age of technology, especially since the use of AI tools started becoming standard practice for PR practitioners. AI has caused a paradigm shift in the way that PR frames narratives, connects with audiences and tracks its deliverables. Is it any surprise then that PR professionals have majorly come to use AI tools in a major way to bolster their outreach efforts?

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AI helps smooth the PR process

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AI tools help PR professionals in a plethora of ways, including allowing  them to get a more precise idea of what is trending with the target audience, thereby allowing them to come up with bespoke messaging for their communication campaign. AI can help them do everything from creating emails and social media posts to press releases that are primed to meet the exact requirements and expectations of the target market in question.

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PR practitioners these days can perform a slew of formerly time consuming tasks like writing press releases, media tracking and creating performance reports in practically no time, freeing them to focus on the human aspects of communication that make it more resonant with the target audience. These involve the all-important tasks of framing the core strategy and narrative as well as building human relationships.

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AI makes PR more creative and innovative

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AI has made PR creative in ways that was not possible in the past. It can, for instance, carry out an analysis of journalists’ past articles, social media engagement and their propensity to respond and help one come up with customised media pitches that get the timing and the tone of the pitch just right for the journalist in question. This increases the pitch success rate by as much as 40%.

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PR professionals can make their press releases more impactful by embedding them with striking visuals created with the help of A generative AI. This can be especially impactful with things like product launches.

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AI promotes efficiency in PR

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AI makes PR way more efficient than it used to be. This hasn’t gone unnoticed by PR professionals, as evidenced by the fact that a study by WE Communications and USC Annenberg Centre for Public Relations found that AI in PR was used 54% of the time for content creation, 40% of the time for data analysis and 37% of the time for background research. What’s more, 95% of the respondents observed that AI helps enhance both efficiency and the quality of their work. For all the criticism PR faced historically on measurable deliverables, new age AI powered PR wears efficiency and easily quantifiable results as a badge of honour. AI in the truest sense provides teeth to PR.

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AI has helped brands rediscover PR

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There is a renewed interest in PR in the age of AI on account of the fact that language models these days analyse media to zero in on which brands to feature in their results. This has businesses calling upon PR companies to help them make their presence felt across the media. It is up to the PR professionals in question to use AI in an intelligent and ethical manner so that they  majorly enhance the reputation of their clients with the help of cutting-edge and highly efficient AI tools. Using disclaimers, for instance, wherever using AI-generated content helps one be more productive and efficient while not in a way impacting upon the integrity of the brand. Similarly, any research that one uses has to be properly attributed. AI, if used the right way, has the ability to supercharge PR and deliver stupendous results.

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AI Use in Public Relations

Content Creation       ████████████████████████████ 54%

Data Analysis          ████████████████████         40%

Background Research    ██████████████████           37%

Benefits Observed by PR Professionals

Enhances efficiency & quality     ████████████████████████████████████████████ 95%

Improves media pitch success       ██████████████████                         Up to 40%

               AI TOOLS

                   │

 ┌─────────────────┼───────────────────┐

 │                 │                   │

 ▼                 ▼                   ▼

Content         Analytics          Research

Creation        & Tracking         & Insights

 │                 │                   │

 └────────────┬────┴────────────┬──────┘

              ▼                 ▼

      Better Strategy     Better Timing

              │

              ▼

      Stronger Media Coverage

              │

              ▼

      Higher Campaign Success

The way forward for the creator economy

 

The rise of the creator economy is a veritable media revolution that is knocking down old entrenched bastions of power and privilege held in place by gatekeepers who dictated the terms of the game.

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Look around you. Hardly any movies rake in the moolah, and no one takes television seriously.

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Digital media, on the other hand, is taking the world by storm. Digital news portals, YouTube videos, podcasts, and social media content move the world, and this is reflected in brands abandoning traditional media in favour of digital outreach.

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The digital universe, with its wonderful array of tools, has changed the very paradigm of creativity and empowered large numbers of people to give full rein to their creativity and innovativeness and, in the process, create healthy revenue streams for themselves.

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-The creator economy is already worth an impressive $250 billion, with this figure slated to double by 2027. The Indian creator economy, for its part, is already valued at an impressive $15.03 billion and is expected to reach $61.87 billion by 2033.

-There were some 200 million people who considered themselves part of the creator economy in 2025.

-As many as 27 million creators earn an income via content creation.

- The total number of creators in India has crossed a creditable 100 million figure, while the number of active creators boasting more than a thousand followers stands between 2 and 2.5 million people.

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The Way Forward

Investments, acquisitions, and mergers are expected to fuel growth going forward. According to Goldman Sachs, the creator economy could approach a size of half a trillion dollars by 2027.  Similarly, Research and Markets suggests that the creator economy should grow to $820.83 billion by 2030. The Indian creator economy, too, is touted to hit a very healthy $61.87 by 2033, providing huge opportunities for brands and creators to enhance their growth and revenue.

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According to BCG, there are more than 2 to 2.5 million monetised content creators in India bearing an influence that exceeds $350 to 400 billion in terms of consumer spending. Their report further states that this ecosystem is expected to lead to more than a trillion dollars' worth of creator driven consumption by the year 2030!.

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The role that AI will play in the emerging creator economy is going to be a significant one. Rather than being a threat to creators, it will be an enabling factor helping reduce costs and enhance efficiency, levelling the playing field for creators across scale. In India, particularly, regional language content creation will drive growth, especially in Tier 2 and 3 cities.

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Worldwide, there will be a rise in the incidence of creators becoming entrepreneurs and in the process actively launching products, selling courses and growing communities and brands, rather than just looking at advertising as a source of revenue. More and more creators will graduate from being mere entertainers hoping to go viral to savvy media company owners. They might even move up the value chain by launching their own niche products catering to the precise requirements of their loyal and dedicated audience. The creator economy will herald the dawn of the niche entrepreneur.

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Summary

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-The creator economy is on the cusp of rapid global and Indian growth, driven by investments, mergers, and acquisitions.

-Creators are all set to become a major economic force, leading to  hundreds of billions of dollars in consumer spending, with creator-led consumption expected to top $1 trillion by 2030.

-AI will be a catalyst and not a disruptor as many expect, enabling creators to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and compete more effectively.

-Regional-language content as well as creators based out of Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities will be key drivers of growth in India.

-Creators will increasingly diversify their income streams, launching products, courses, communities, and brands instead of relying solely on advertising, as in the past

-The creator economy will undergo a paradigm shift, evolving from an influencer model to an entrepreneurship model, with creators being able to build sustainable media businesses.

-Niche creators with loyal communities will gain prominence, signalling the rise of the "niche entrepreneur" in place of today’s mass-market influencers.

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Will AI make us all unemployable?

 

Concept and prompt by Vipin Labroo; illustration generated using OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Is AI a Frankenstein's monster which threatens to devour its creator by taking away their ability to earn a living? Is it a genie with potentially irreversible destructive tendencies that can never be reined in or stuffed back into the bottle that we released it from? Is it going to mark the end of the careers  of the educated young with degrees who view a white-collar job as their passport to success and a good life? With as many as 71 million young people not being able to find the right kind of job worldwide because of  the rapid expansion in the use of AI across businesses, organisations and industries, will we not see a worsening of an already bad situation? The gravity of this state of affairs can be gauged by the fact that according to UN DESA data, the global population will reach 9 billion by 2050, 6 billion of whom will be of working age.

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So are we looking at a ticking time bomb with regard to the future  employment prospects  for the educated young who had  hitherto been assured of decent employment? Will profit focused businesses and corporations preferring super efficient AI in place of slow, inefficient and plodding human workers lead to people of working age increasingly being rendered unemployable? What sort of a future are the young people really looking at?

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Going by how technological upheavals have been managed by people down the ages, it does seem that ultimately we will take AI in our stride and leverage it to advance humans to a much better way of living than before. But the trouble with AI is that it is well on its way to work autonomously of human oversight and even take decisions of its own volition, which may possibly make it do  what it sees as being in its own best interest and not that of the people it is supposed to serve. This is something that has not escaped the attention of experts, social scientists, industry doyens, civil society and governments around the world. There is already much talk about regulating AI and putting stringent safety measures in place.

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It is not surprising, therefore, that a minimum of 72 countries around the world have come forward with more than a thousand AI-related policy initiatives as well as legal guardrails to assuage the people's concerns and worries pertaining to AI. 

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Preventing AI from setting the employment agenda

It is important to understand and appreciate the fact that AI, no matter how sophisticated, is after all no more than a set of productivity technologies and tools meant to serve human needs and not the vested interests of anyone or anything at the cost of depriving people of their livelihood. Rather than ensuring employment for AI at the cost of the human workforce, one has to ensure that AI enhances and empowers the latter to grow and flourish.

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The economy is run as a pact between capitalists and the workforce to have a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship that serves both of their interests.. Any rupture of this compact on account of business owners edging out workers and making huge profits in the process cannot bode well for society.

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Fortunately or unfortunately for total AI take over votaries, there is a limit to how capable it is to completely perform every known function performed by real people and perform it substantially better than them. For one, the cost of large scale implementation of AI is prohibitive for most organisations and businesses. Second, one may talk about Agentic AI and all that; but there isn't enough trust in the technology and its ability to work well autonomously and with minimal supervision. So, there is this requirement of having to create a whole new class of workers to help supervise and manage these new fangled technologies.

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One cannot also rule out the possibility of the massive hype surrounding AI having created this huge bubble which could burst and end up tarnishing the image of AI as a knight in shining armour slated to transform human destiny, hopefully for the better.

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History is a great teacher and it tells us that mighty empires come and go and every once in a while a great new technology dazzles the world for some time. Our home, the planet Earth, meanwhile continues to spin on its axis and another epoch changes. The more the world changes, the more it remains the same.

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Will AI cause a water crisis?

 

Illustration: AI-generated infographic based on the author's article, "Will AI Cause a Water Crisis?"

AI has dominated conversations in recent years, causing equal amounts of hope and fear amongst its supporters and detractors, respectively, owing to its ability to massively enhance productivity, even while it threatens to make human employees redundant. What has perhaps gone unnoticed is that AI may be contributing to a water crisis in a world already reeling from an environmental crisis brought about by more than a century of rapacious, largely unhindered exploitation of the earth’s scarce natural resources. Is AI going to add another disappointing chapter to this sordid saga?

​Water Guzzling Data Centres are the Problem

It is data centres that make AI tick, but in the process consume a lot of water to cool down the servers that help in carrying out tasks ranging from summarising a document to creating an image. What that does to a country like India, where 342 million people out of a population of 1.4 billion people don’t have access to safe water, is something that needs to be seriously looked at. Water-hungry data centre infrastructure is expected to annually consume enough water to satisfy the water needs of 1.3 billion people at the end of the decade. In India, it is projected that data centres’ annual water consumption could cater to Mumbai’s water needs for a whole week. Apart from the above, the fact that the electricity generated for running a data centre also requires water adds to the problem.

​That being stated, data centres are not the only business or industrial activity that consumes a lot of water. There have been quite a few heavy industries in the past that required the use of a lot of water. The steel, textile, chemical and paper & pulp industries are cases in point in this regard. But the problem with data centres, specifically is that these are often located in areas where water resources are already very strained. The situation gets exacerbated by global warming, which can further negatively impact the availability of water.

​Can you have data centres and yet avert a water crisis?

Given that no country, including the most populous one in the world like India, can afford to lag behind with regard to AI adoption, one has to look at managing the negative fallout of such a policy with regard to pressure on scarce water resources. For instance, data centres could look at rainwater harvesting or treated wastewater for their cooling needs. They could also look at using seawater for cooling the servers, something which gives coastal cities like Visakhapatnam an advantage. No wonder that Reliance Industries  has decided to set up a 1.5 GW data centre there.

​Improved cooling technologies like air cooling and liquid cooling, as well closed loop systems, can also help reduce the consumption of water for cooling data centre servers. Besides, the use of more efficient newer chips that require less energy and cooling than in the past helps mitigate the situation as well.

​Data centre growth- planning is the key

Data centre growth may be inevitable in an era that is already defined by AI, but allowing that to happen in an unplanned, haphazard and random manner can prove disastrous for water security across nations at a time when climate change is already negatively impacting water availability across the globe. Ensuring that data centres don’t come up in regions facing water scarcity and choosing optimal infrastructure design is of the essence here. The implementation of efficient water management practices can help ensure that the growth of data centres provides an impetus to the growth of AI in countries around the world, rather than lead to debilitating water crises.

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More ROI from AI or Humans?

Illustration generated with AI assistance using ChatGPT and DALL·E by OpenAI. Concept and article text by Vipin Labroo

The whole rationale behind deploying AI to the extent that it threatens to decimate whole professions is premised on the fact that it leads to much enhanced productivity, reduced costs and unprecedented profits. In other words, much more ROI or return on investment than would accrue if humans were employed to carry out the same tasks. But is it really the case that the ROI from using AI in place of humans is always higher? Let us take a look and try to assess if it is indeed like that.

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For all the hype and hoopla surrounding the rising adoption of AI across industries, the fact of the matter is that the ROI delivered by it is way below expectations. According to research carried out by Scaled Agile’s partner, Return on AI Institute; while 90% of organisations find that they derive some value from AI, only a minority are seeing significant economic impact. Even so, almost 60% of them have started slowing or reducing hiring, banking on future AI productivity gains. At the same time, only 2% of them have linked those decisions to actual results. This points to businesses perceiving more value from AI than actually realising it.

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AI Comes at a Cost

Transitioning to AI comes at a cost. Much of it is in the form of the consumption of natural resources like water and rare minerals, as well as damage to the environment on account of the large amount of electricity  required to be produced to make it functional. At the same time, there is a parallel loss of valuable human expertise that would have grown and matured over the years if not replaced by AI. Completely slamming the door on the face of human ingenuity and its ability to create wonders, and instead depending on AI, which hones its skills by studying past human achievements, may not be the bright idea that many think that it is.

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Comparing humans and AI is like comparing apples with oranges

AI has the ability to train on very large amounts of data. However when compared with how vast humanity is, this is a very small part of it. Given that about 80% of online content is available in only 10 languages out of 7000 spoken worldwide there is not much credibility in the claim of AI’s infallibility. This is on account of the fact that a language is more than a simple means of communication. It carries within itself the values, culture and way of life of a people. 

Training AI on a sanitised and restricted data set means that it is picking up the perspectives and biases of only a section of the world’s population.

​This will in no way enable AI to understand and appreciate the whole scale of the values, cultural landscapes and knowledge embodied in the human race that is 8 billion in number. AI may be supremely useful in the right circumstances, but that does not make it as intelligent as the human race.

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ROI From AI requires human support

In a scenario where AI use doesn’t begin to deliver ROI for 2 to 4 years, is it better to invest in human resources and develop and grow them over the years? In any case, organisations that do manage to show high ROI on their AI investment are the ones that have realised that a human centric business model works best in an environment where AI expertise is encouraged. The key learning over here is that AI performs best when it empowers people by transforming how they perform work. The focus here is on aiding the human work force to perform better and not on finding ways and means to replace people with technology on account of illogical FOMO felt by business houses around the world, driven by unfounded hype.

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Money Makes the Mare Go

Feeding the AI behemoth with astronomical investment in the hope of future super profits is not tenable, and more and more companies are realising it. Until the time AI comprehensively proves its worth as a viable business proposition for organisations across scale and geography, it makes way more sense for one to trust  and invest in people. That will get them more ROI in the near term, and who knows the long-term future as well. AI has as much chance of making people leave the workforce as the internet has had since its launch years ago. While AI will doubtless make its worth felt more and more, it will only do so with the help of people. There is no other way.

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