The Commoditisation of Expert Power

The exploitation of knowledge is no longer sustainable. Most experts have not noticed yet.

The knowledge that senior professionals built their careers on is not disappearing. It is being reproduced. At speed, at scale, and at a cost that makes the original increasingly difficult to justify on economic grounds alone.

That is commoditisation. And it is the most precise description currently available of what is happening to expert power.

What expert power actually was

French and Raven identified it in 1959. Among the five bases of social power, expert power was always the most structurally vulnerable. It did not rest on position, on the ability to reward or punish, or on personal regard. It rested entirely on a perceived gap. Not on what you knew in absolute terms. On what those around you could not easily access.

That gap was the power. The knowledge was the commodity.

For decades the gap held. The cost of closing it was prohibitive. Executives could not acquire sufficient domain understanding to challenge their experts meaningfully. Those who held specialised knowledge were indispensable to those who needed it. That indispensability was the source of their authority, their pricing power, and in many cases their professional identity.

The first attack

The internet did not destroy expert power. It narrowed the gap for the first time at scale.

Previously unavailable knowledge became accessible to anyone with a search engine and the patience to use it. But the internet created a new problem for everyone else. Knowledge was suddenly abundant. Making sense of it was not. The volume of available information outpaced most people’s ability to assimilate and analyse it.

Most experts adapted instinctively. They shifted their power base from information holding to diagnosis and interpretation. While others were drowning in data, the expert could synthesise, make sense of complexity, and deliver conclusions the non-expert could not easily reach alone. That capability became the new source of indispensability. And it held, because analysis and synthesis remained genuinely costly and difficult to replicate.

Until now.

The second attack

AI has now reached the territory experts retreated to.

It retrieves. It synthesises. It increasingly replicates the diagnostic and analytical functions that became the expert’s second line of defence after the internet eroded the first. The retreat route that worked once is no longer available in the same form.

The people sitting around the expert now have access to something they did not have before. Not expertise of their own. Something more disruptive than that. The ability to generate informed challenges at the edges of the expert’s knowledge, quickly, credibly, and without sustained study.

Where the expert was once questioned in general terms, they are now being tested with precision. Not ‘are you sure about that?’ but ‘what about this specific counterargument, how does this body of research bear on it, what would your position be if this variable changes?’

For the expert whose command of their subject was built on relative advantage rather than complete command, this is a new and uncomfortable exposure.

The precise boundary

The commoditisation of expert power has a boundary. It reaches everything that can be retrieved, synthesised, and recombined from existing sources. It does not reach what genuine domain mastery produces.

Complete command of the full terrain of a field. The ability to see connections that do not yet exist as explicit knowledge anywhere. The judgement to navigate situations that have no precise precedent. The capacity to identify where established thinking is wrong in ways no data yet captures.

These are not information retrieval problems. They are map-holding problems. And the map cannot be commoditised because it is not held as information. It is held as understanding. The difference between the two is precisely what the current moment is making visible.

The principle governing this transition is not new. It is the third of the five principles of power I first articulated in Influential Leadership (Gautrey, Kogan Page, 2014). Where supply is scarce and demand is high, power concentrates in the hands of those who control the supply. The supply of approximated expertise is no longer scarce. The supply of genuine domain mastery is. And the demand for it is growing.

Colin Gautrey, June 2026