What explains the $100m to $1b salaries being paid to top AI researchers?
The way business value is created has changed forever – but our mental models haven’t caught up yet.
What is value anyway? In the 18th century, it was all about land. In the 19th, it became about labour. In the 20th, the narrative shifted to resources.
And now? It’s knowledge.
I was reading Grant (1996) and a quote stopped me in my tracks.
‘All learning takes place inside individual human heads; an organization learns in only two ways: (a) by the learning of its members, or (b) by ingesting new members who have knowledge the organization didn’t previously have’ (Simon, 1991: 125).
Some people think knowedge is safe in organisational rules and procedures. But we’ve all seen what happens when a key person leaves, and someone else picks up that rule book and finds it’s useless.
Will AI rescue us? That’s still up for debate – maybe if we can fix hallucinations and guarantee quality output. It’s still not clear if this is the answer.
But if these two are mirages – if knowledge can only be held and exercised by individuals, the foundations of shareholder value shift under our feet.
Value becomes about people, specifically ones that can create knowledge and apply knowledge. Finding ones that can do both is like hunting unicorns.
And that perhaps explains why some companies are willing to pay so much for them.
REFERENCES
Grant, R.M., 1996. Toward a Knowledge-Based Theory of the Firm. Strategic Management Journal 17, 109–122.
Simon, H. A. (1991). ‘Bounded rationality and organizational learning’, Organization Science, 2, pp. 125-134.
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