Expertise used to mean two things fused together: technical reps, and the judgment they produced. In a recent salon, BetterUp CEO Alexi Robichaux argues AI has mastered the first half — leaving the second as the asset you didn’t know you were building.
For most of your career, expertise meant two things braided together so tightly you couldn’t tell them apart: the technical know-how to do the work, and the judgment to know when, how, and why to do it. You didn’t set out to build judgment. It just happened — a byproduct of doing the thing a thousand times, badly at first, then less badly, until one day you could sense the right call before you could explain it.
In a recent salon conversation with Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO of BetterUp, that assumption got a hard look, and what he described has real implications for anyone who has spent decades accumulating exactly this kind of expertise and is now watching the market decide, in real time, which half of it still matters.
Robichaux’s framing is simple but destabilizing: expertise was never one thing. It was tactical know-how, the mechanics, the reps, the muscle memory fused with judgment and discernment, the harder-to-name capacity to read a situation and know what it calls for. Historically, you got the second by doing the first, over and over, until pattern recognition became instinct.
AI is now very good at the first half. It is not good at the second. And that’s creating what Robichaux calls an “inversion loop”: the technical repetition that used to produce judgment is exactly the work AI is best positioned to absorb. Which raises an uncomfortable question for anyone building the next generation of talent, and a very different, far more interesting question for anyone who already has the judgment: how do you develop discernment if the reps that used to teach it are disappearing?
For anyone building a portfolio career, that second question isn’t hypothetical. It’s the whole thesis behind the idea.
There’s a particular kind of undervaluing that happens to senior professionals, especially women, moving from a single defined role into board work, advisory work, fractional leadership, portfolio careers. The instinct is to describe the tactical résumé — titles, functions, years — because that’s the currency the traditional ladder rewarded. But that currency is deflating fast, and the asset that’s appreciating is the one that never had a clean line item: the pattern recognition built from two or three decades of high-stakes calls, seen enough times to trust your read.
This is where Robichaux’s research gets sharper than intuition. BetterUp’s data on managers found something counterintuitive: AI usage alone doesn’t predict who becomes a better leader. High-performing and low-performing managers use AI in statistically indistinguishable ways. What separates them is what they do with the time it frees up. The ones who reinvest saved hours into the work AI can’t do — building trust, having the hard developmental conversation, sitting with a direct report through something genuinely difficult — see real gains. The ones who just do more task work don’t.
In other words: AI doesn’t replace judgment. It exposes who has it, and who’s been coasting on task completion instead.
Robichaux’s team also coined a term that’s since become shorthand across HR circles — “work-slop” — for the flood of AI-generated output that looks polished and says nothing. His read on it isn’t a technology problem. It’s a thinking problem, wearing new clothes. Work-slop happens, in his words, when people feel “compelled or mandated to use AI precociously” and start to believe they no longer need to think, so a small lapse in judgment gets amplified into something embarrassing at scale. The tool didn’t create the gap. It just made an old gap visible to everyone at once.
That’s a useful diagnostic for anyone evaluating where they sit in an organization, a board, or a client relationship right now. Are you the person whose output gets sharper when a machine does the first draft, because you know exactly what’s missing and how to fix it? Or are you the person whose gaps just got louder?
What makes this idea land is Robichaux’s insistence that judgment, resilience, and optimism aren’t the soft, unmeasurable qualities they’re often dismissed as. He pointed to decades of military research showing that pre-battle optimism levels predict, with real statistical power, who develops PTSD and who earns commendations for heroism under fire. If something that consequential can be measured and, more importantly, developed, then the idea that discernment is some mystical trait you either have or don’t starts to fall apart.
That reframing matters enormously for a portfolio career. It means the judgment you’ve built isn’t a vague intangible you hope a board chair intuits from your bio. It’s a real, describable, defensible asset built through specific reps, sharpened through specific failures, and transferable in ways that tactical skills, increasingly, are not.
Here’s the part worth sitting with: nobody set out to accumulate judgment. It was never the goal on a performance review, never the line item in a promotion case. It accrued quietly, underneath the actual job, every time you made a call under pressure and watched how it played out. That’s precisely why it’s so easy to undersell. It doesn’t register as an asset at all; it just feels like knowing what to do.
But the market is repricing it in real time. The tactical half of expertise, the part that used to take a decade of reps to earn, is being absorbed by machines faster than anyone expected. What’s left standing, and rising in value as it does, is the thing those reps were quietly building in you the whole time.
That’s the opening. Not a defensive one, an active one. A portfolio career built on board seats, advisory work, and fractional leadership isn’t a consolation prize for stepping off the traditional ladder. It’s a bet that discernment, built and tested over decades, is now the scarcest and most tradable currency in the room. The task work was never the point. It just didn’t feel that way until something else got good enough to do it instead.
So the real work now isn’t building more expertise. It’s learning to name the kind you already have — out loud, in the boardroom, on the bio, in the pitch — instead of letting it hide inside a résumé line that was never built to hold it.
Athena members can access the full recording of this salon conversation here in the Athena library. Not a member? Let’s talk.
