The Commercial Singularity

Twenty years ago you won a conversation with what you knew. You understood the market, the numbers and the alternatives better than your client, and that head start was your value. Today that same client sits down already knowing. They have read your website, compared your competitors and talked their problem through with AI before you speak your first sentence. The ground beneath the classic commercial relationship has shifted. Most professionals feel it before they can name it. This piece names it.

The asymmetry that carried your value

To see what is shifting, you first have to see what your value rested on: on inequality of information. George Akerlof showed in 1970 how a market unravels when one party structurally knows more than the other. His market for lemons later earned him the Nobel Prize. Darby and Karni (1973) gave that insight a name that fits professional services perfectly: credence goods. These are services whose quality the client cannot judge: not beforehand, and not even afterward. The lawyer, the accountant, the private banker, the consultant: they are the textbook cases. Could you, as a client, tell whether that advice was truly the best? Whether the annual accounts were optimal? Whether that particular portfolio was the right one? Rarely. You had to trust. And that trust, built on a knowledge advantage, was for decades the source of the professional’s value.

AI puts client and professional on equal footing

That advantage is evaporating, faster than most realize. Generative AI gives your client access to aggregated market knowledge, real-time benchmarks, a second opinion and an ROI simulation, at any moment, without you. The figures leave little room for doubt. A B2B buyer now spends barely seventeen percent of the journey talking to suppliers (Gartner 2019). Nearly nine in ten buyers use generative AI for their own research (Forrester 2025). One analysis of B2B procurement put it bluntly: vendors are no longer the primary source of insight, they are a data point within a broader analytical framework (PYMNTS 2026).

At the same time, the cost of building falls toward zero. What used to take months of research and development, a small team now does in days. Kurzweil (2005) called the point where technologies converge the singularity. In commercial reality it means that neither the product nor the information is scarce anymore. What is scarce is someone who can hold the right conversation.

And note: this is not only true at the sales table. It holds in front of a room of investors who understand your market through AI as sharply as you do. It holds on a stage, where your listener has already fact-checked your numbers before you say them. You may, and you must, assume the other party stands on equal footing.

More information, less certainty

Here is where it bites, and precisely there lies your new role. All that information does not make your client more certain. It makes them less certain. One in five buyers feels less confident after using AI (Forrester 2025). More than half doubt whether the AI information is even correct, and 69 percent therefore still validate their insights with a human (Gartner 2026). That same study measures something telling: a good professional makes their client thirty-two percentage points more confident in the decision.

So the client expects a different value from you. Not more information, they already have it. But meaning: someone who helps them choose, filters the noise and truly understands their situation. Adamson (2022) calls this sensemaking. It also explains why so much of what is on offer feels like a commodity. A commodity rarely originates in the product. It originates because everyone holds the same conversation: about price, features and comparisons. Move the conversation to context, decisions and consequences, and the comparison changes. The product has not changed. Its meaning has.

Value now emerges only in the conversation.

Four shifts that redraw your conversation

When information no longer carries value, the commercial logic shifts on four fronts at once.

From information to meaning. When both parties have the same data, value comes not from explanation but from interpretation. An accountant who explains the numbers creates little value. An accountant who helps make sense of the decision behind those numbers creates value.

From relationship to trust in thinking. Relational value is no longer ‘how are the kids?’. That is social lubricant, not leverage. The real relational value is that the client trusts your way of thinking: that they call you because they see more clearly after speaking with you.

From offering to context. When products become commodities, value shifts to the client’s situation. Not ‘what do we sell?’, but ‘what are they trying to achieve, and what tension sits behind their question?’. That is Christensen’s jobs-to-be-done logic (Christensen and Raynor 2003), translated to the conversation.

From transaction to decision space. Transactional value gets automated; decisions stay human. The conversation becomes the place where decisions are formed, not where products are sold. As Vargo and Lusch (2004) argued long ago: value never sits in the product itself, it emerges in use, in the interaction.

From your expertise, but above all beyond it

Does this mean expertise no longer matters? On the contrary. Without craft there is no credibility. But expertise has become the entry ticket, no longer the differentiator. You make the difference beyond your expertise: by thinking and conversing from the client’s perspective, in their language, in their world, with services that connect to what they are really trying to achieve.

This is not abstract. It is exactly what one sector after another is discovering. The accountant who automates the annual accounts and finds that growth now comes only from the advice. The banker who sees their product information on every comparison site and realizes the client is looking for something other than a rate. The adviser whose report merely confirms what the client already suspected. Every time, the answer is the same: the conversation beyond the expertise, held in the client’s world. It is the core of what we build at Add Business with financial federations, with accountants and with other professionals.

From pitch to cockpit

That shift calls for a different position. Not out front, with a pitch. But beside the client, as a copilot. Not because you cannot take the lead, but because the client is now at the controls, and you help them navigate. On addbusiness.be I deliberately call this the cockpit: the conversation where meaning, direction and decision come together.

And that conversation is not a single moment, it is a loop. A first conversation gives meaning to the situation. A second makes direction visible. In a third, a decision ripens. Together you build something that creates new value, and that result triggers the next conversation. Meaning, direction, decision, value, next conversation. That is where your real commercial model lives. Not in your pipeline, but in your patterns of conversations.

In practice: look back at your last three client conversations. How much time went to explaining what the client already knew, and how much to helping them understand what it means for them? Reverse that ratio in your next conversation. Because the professional who still makes the difference tomorrow is not the one who knows the most. It is the one who holds the best conversation.

References

• Adamson, Brent. 2022. “Sensemaking for Sales.” Harvard Business Review 100 (1): 48–57.
• Akerlof, George A. 1970. “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 84 (3): 488–500.
• Christensen, Clayton M., and Michael E. Raynor. 2003. The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
• Darby, Michael R., and Edi Karni. 1973. “Free Competition and the Optimal Amount of Fraud.” Journal of Law and Economics 16 (1): 67–88.
• Forrester Research. 2025. B2B Buyer Adoption of Generative AI. Cambridge, MA: Forrester Research.
• Gartner. 2019. The B2B Buying Journey. Stamford, CT: Gartner.
• Gartner. 2026. “Gartner Survey Finds 69% of B2B Buyers Turn to Sales Reps to Validate AI-Generated Insights.” Press release, May 20, 2026. Gartner.
• Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. New York: Viking.
• PYMNTS Intelligence. 2026. “How AI Killed Information Asymmetry in B2B Procurement.” PYMNTS.com, February 2026.
• Vargo, Stephen L., and Robert F. Lusch. 2004. “Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing.” Journal of Marketing 68 (1): 1–17.

Series · Value in the conversation · Add Business