clarity scarcity
A founder I work with is further ahead on AI than almost anyone.
He already runs his whole story through his sales team, his prompts, and a fleet of agents building in the background. When I asked what he was most worried about, it wasn’t producing enough. It was whether all of it still said the same thing.
He’d figured out early what most teams are about to learn the hard way. When you can generate anything, the scarce thing is a story that holds its shape everywhere it shows up
So try what he did. Read ten things your company shipped this week, back to back.
Drafts, decks, agent outputs.
Do they read like they came from ten different companies?
Every team is shipping more, the priorities keep multiplying, and the org is running in many directions at once. Nobody’s sleeping on the job. You just got faster at making things than at understanding them, and the gap quietly became the work.
AI drove the cost of production to near zero. But it left the cost of understanding behind.
With Infinite Outputs, Clarity Is the Scarcest Asset
Information now multiplies faster than interpretation.
So the thing in short supply is no longer content. It’s the shared understanding that makes any output make sense..
Start with what AI actually made cheap: efficiency, the incremental 10% move. It’s already clarity-rich, that metric is obvious. And AI now hands it to you in infinite supply.
Efficiency is cheap now. Getting value, not so much.
A 10% gain is the same game played a little better, but a 10x leap is a different ballgame. There are infinite ways to play the first and only a handful to win the second. That takes the discipline to make the hard trade-offs and put everything behind the one bet that matters. And that discipline runs on the understanding AI can’t manufacture for you.
So the scarcity flips. The binding constraint is no longer output. It’s clarity: knowing which bet to make, whether the ten things your company shipped cohere, what any of the flood actually means.
The companies that pull ahead spend their scarce clarity on the one bet that matters. The rest keep pouring cheap output into 10% gains, doubling down on the one thing that was never scarce.
Shared Language, or a Faster Mess?
AI raises the stakes on all of this, and adds a new twist.
Agents are a new part of the workforce now, a new flow of work that takes understanding to manage, not more output. Point forty agents at an unmanaged language layer and they multiply the confusion at machine speed. Give them a shared one and the same volume compounds instead of scattering.
The scarcity bites hardest where the market itself is stretching. Your customers now sit at wildly different points on the curve. Take a company whose buyers span a frontier lab living years ahead, a company all-in on building, and a legacy brand still making incremental moves. One message across that spread collapses clarity. You have to name where each one sits and meet them there.
And it bites at the level of a single artifact. A nonprofit that I advise started with one pitch and ended up with six, each tuned to a different major donor. Every version read fine on its own. Together they had no center, six documents making six slightly different arguments, with no canonical one left. The donors felt the incoherence before anyone could name it.
Six versions isn’t range. It’s one story losing the thread six times, because understanding goes scarce the moment you make one thing do every job.
The Company That Can Trust Its Own Output
The prize?
A company that can trust what it ships because understanding is shared, not scarce.
The visible shift is small and it changes everything: the scarce resource isn’t output anymore. It moved to understanding, and most of your new capacity is still aimed at the side that’s already abundant.
When understanding is the scarce resource, the leverage is a shared language layer that lets your people and your agents make sense of the flood at the speed they produce it. Building that layer is what we’ve been working toward with Storied AI: an ontology for strategy and comms. More on that soon.
So run the test this issue opened with.
Read ten things your company shipped, back to back, and count the number of different companies that are described. If it’s more than one, you’ve found where your clarity is going.
Reply and tell me what you saw.
Michael
P.S. When you’re ready, here’s three ways I can help:
If you want a second set of eyes on your narrative, reply and tell me more
If you need narrative architecture, I help operators do just that. Apply for Q3
If you need a keynote, I do them on a select basis. Let’s talk