Judgment is the scarce input
Why the businesses that compound in the AI era put their sharpest humans in front of the machine, not behind it.
For most of the last two decades, the binding constraint in an operating business was execution. If you wanted a financial model built, a market analysis run, a support queue cleared, you needed people who could do the work — and good people were expensive and slow to hire.
That constraint has quietly disappeared. The marginal cost of capable work has fallen close to zero. What remains scarce is judgment: knowing which number actually decides the outcome, which deal to walk away from, where the unit economics break under load rather than in the spreadsheet.
The mistake most firms are making is to treat AI as a way to remove humans from the loop. The firms that will compound do the opposite. They put their sharpest people in front of the machine — pointing it, editing it, deciding — and let it absorb the volume behind them.