A brilliant baker decides to open a bakery. Apart from baking, she is also expected to be a graphic designer, a lawyer, an accountant, a marketer, and a photographer, whether she likes it or not. For most of modern history, she has had two options. Either hire a professional for each task— impossible for a bakery — or do without. Doing without has meant competing at a permanent disadvantage against the chains with dedicated departments for each of these jobs.
So until now, entrepreneurs in her position have done without. Their logo has been clip art. Their contracts have been whatever the supplier handed to them. Meanwhile, their competitors, backed by scale and capital, have had specialised teams.
The entire economy was quietly shaped by this gap between the businesses that could afford expertise and the ones that couldn’t. This gap is what has long decided who grew and who stayed small.”
This gap is now closing, and it will change far more than bakeries.
The Expert Work You Already Summon
You have probably experienced the early version of this yourself.
You translated a document without a translator. You filed taxes without an accountant. You made a passable flyer without a designer, edited a video without a studio, drafted a basic agreement from a template that once meant a billable hour. In every one of these instances, you undertook expert work that used to require a human expert, and you paid next to nothing. Multiply that by every profession at once, and you reach the real shift, the one the previous chapter of this series pointed straight at.
With expertise becoming abundant, the workplace, built entirely around the scarcity of expertise, must change. Human labour is becoming a digital workforce.
Fifty Years Ago — And A Strange Question
To see why this matters, let’s start with a simple question: Why do companies exist at all?
In 1937, British economist Ronald Coase answered it deceptively simply in an essay on the nature of the firm. In principle, he said, you could produce anything by contracting it out piece by piece on the open market — this person for an hour, that one for a task. We don’t, because using the market is expensive in its own way. It involves finding people, negotiating, coordinating, and checking their work. It is often cheaper to gather people under one roof, put them on a salary, and coordinate them by command rather than by contract. That, Coase said, is what a firm is: a machine for coordinating scarce expertise more cheaply than the open market can.
Hold onto that, because it is the whole story. The firm is a response to a cost. And that cost is about to fall through the floor.
We have seen this before.
In 1900, around forty per cent of working Americans farmed; today it is one or two per cent. That transformation is hard to picture today, yet it displaced tens of millions of people over the decades it took.”
In the same vein, technology has constantly transformed the workplace. The typing pool, once a fixture of every office, vanished into the word processor. The bookkeeping clerk, who spent a lifetime adding columns by hand, was made extinct by a piece of software called the spreadsheet.
But notice what the spreadsheet actually did, because it is the most honest preview we have. It destroyed the clerk and created the financial analyst. Work moved up rather than disappearing. Far more people work with spreadsheets today, and they do things the clerk never could. Automation took a job, and in the same motion, built a more valuable one on its grave.
Today, The Firm Starts To Dissolve
Now run that forward with a tool that doesn’t just automate one task, but summons expert judgment across all domains at once.
The bakery owner today becomes an individual directing a fleet of digital experts — a designer, a lawyer, an analyst, a marketer — none on her payroll, all on demand. The “company of one” stops being a curiosity and becomes the new normal. And the large firm, whose advantage was that it could afford the experts a single entrepreneur couldn’t, loses part of the reason it grew large in the first place.
This is the deeper meaning of a digital workforce. It is not merely that machines do some of the work. It is that the firm, the central institution of economic life for two centuries, has answered a problem that is now partly dissolving.
When expertise is nearly free to summon, the boundary between what happens inside and outside a company begins to move.”
At T9L, the way we support ventures has also undergone a shift. Professional branding used to require an agency, finished video used to require a studio, and so on. Ventures such as brnd.ink and TheBestCut are hypotheses that this kind of expert production is collapsing towards the individual. They are early, and several questions remain unanswered. But the change is showing up across domain after domain, as individuals are increasingly able to direct the kind of work that organisations needed earlier.
The Half Of The Story The Optimists Skip
It would be dishonest to tell this only from the bakery owner’s side.
Every transformation on this list was often a catastrophe before it was a liberation for the people living through it.
The displaced farmer did not become a software analyst. His grandchildren did, two generations and a great deal of hardship later.”
Aggregate numbers that “recover” conceal individual lives that don’t. When the work moves up, it means millions of people will be told that what they were good at is no longer needed. The next step, “retraining”, is thin comfort at fifty.
Three honest worries follow, and the cheerful version skips all three.
The first is concentration. When the experts you summon are owned by a handful of companies, the gains from abundant expertise may flow not to the bakery owner but to whoever owns the digital workforce. Abundance does not distribute itself, as we learned in the first essay in this series.
The second worry that no one seems to discuss is the broken ladder. People become experts by doing junior work. The lawyer today was once a paralegal. The partner today was a junior analyst who worked up the ranks, and the creative director grew from being an assistant to a designer, and so on. This junior work is precisely what a digital workforce does most cheaply.
If the bottom rungs are automated away, we may raise a generation with no way to climb into the very expertise we are all counting on the machines to supply. You cannot expect to keep producing senior people if you stop making junior ones.”
The third challenge is accountability. The firm was never just a coordination machine; it was also a structure of responsibility. When a salaried professional errs, there is a person and an institution to answer for it. When your fleet of digital experts is wrong — the contract has a flaw, the analysis is off, the diagnosis misleads — who is accountable? This question is not a small one, and it has no good answer so far.
And yet not all work dissolves. The work that is fundamentally about human presence — care, craft, the teacher in the classroom or the nurse at the bedside, resists this, and may become more valued precisely because it cannot be summoned.
The future of work is not “everything automated.” It is a strange split: the codifiable rushing towards abundance, the deeply human becoming rarer and dearer.”
The Slow Institutions
All of which runs into the law we examined in a previous essay, one that shadows this entire series: Technology changes quickly, while institutions change slowly.
Our labour laws, tax systems, safety nets, and the entire idea of a “job” with its benefits and protections were built for a world of employees inside firms. They do not yet know what to do with a person who employs no one and directs a hundred digital workers. Or, more worryingly, what to do about the people this arrangement leaves behind.
The technology arrives in years. The institutions take decades to adapt. The gap between them is where the real pain, and the real politics, will live.”
Some economies have more at stake than others. India built an extraordinary engine of growth by becoming the world’s coordinated provider of professional labour: the back offices, the call centres, the software services the rest of the world was happy to contract out. That was itself an early digital workforce, delivered by people. The uncomfortable question facing us now is what happens to a development path built on supplying expertise, when expertise itself can increasingly be summoned directly. It may be an opportunity, the same talent now amplified and building for itself rather than for others. It may well be a threat to millions of livelihoods. Most likely, it is both. Which one wins will be decided less by the technology and more by how fast people and institutions can climb the ladder before its lower rungs disappear.
The Redesign Of Work
The firm was one of humanity’s great inventions — a way to gather scarce expertise and point it at a problem. For two centuries, it organised our economies, our cities, and most of our waking hours. We built it because expertise was rare and had to be hoarded under one roof to be useful.
Expertise is about to stop being rare. So the firm, the job, and the employee — the whole architecture of modern work — is, for the first time, up for redesign. That is the opportunity of the century as well as the disruption of the century.”
But notice the question now hanging over all of it. When anyone can summon a contract, an analysis, a diagnosis, or a design for almost nothing, the value no longer lies in producing the expert output. Output is everywhere. The value, and the scarcity, moves to a harder question: which of all this expert output can you actually trust?
That question is about to become the most important one in the economy. It is where we go next.
***
Editorial Disclosure:
AI-assisted tools were used for copy-editing.
This essay is part of a longer series tracing a single argument across history, economics, governance and human behaviour: that every technological revolution solves a scarcity and every new abundance creates a new scarcity. Following this pattern into the AI era, the series argues that trust is the defining scarcity of our time. Read them here:
Chapter 1: The History Of Scarcity
Chapter 2: The Personalisation Revolution
Chapter 3: The Age Of Anticipation
Chapter 4: The Digital Workforce