For decades, clients identified "professional" by what it wasn't. No typos meant good writer. No Comic Sans meant real designer. No broken links meant competent developer. They weren't buying expertise—they were buying the absence of obvious failure.
AI eliminates obvious failure. Perfect grammar is free. Professional layouts are one prompt away. Clean code is the default. Every amateur now clears the bar that clients thought measured competence.
The Invisible Expertise
This reveals that the bar was always too low. Clients were hiring based on "doesn't actively suck" when they needed "actually works." Absence of visible problems confused with the presence of invisible solutions.
Real expertise is invisible until things break. The logo that survives every context. The copy that converts specifically. The architecture that scales elegantly. The strategy that anticipates what you didn't know to fear. None of this is visible at the pitch. It only reveals itself in practice, usually after the check clears.
When everyone's proposal looks professional, when every mockup feels polished, when every pitch deck flows perfectly—what's left? The stuff that was always there but is incredibly hard to see: taste, judgment, foresight, the knowledge of what breaks things.
The professionals who get this aren't worried. They know expertise was never about clearing the floor—it was about knowing where the ceiling is. They're not competing with AI any more than structural engineers compete with level ground.
The comedy isn't that AI is making everyone look professional. It is that looking professional was ever the standard. We built an entire economy on spotting incompetence instead of recognizing competence.
Real expertise remains what it always was: invisible until needed, unrecognizable until tested, worth nothing until it's worth everything.