The Future Will Belong to People Who Can Connect Ideas

There was a time when simply having access to information gave you an advantage.

If you knew something your competitors didn’t, understood a market they hadn’t discovered or had access to expertise that was difficult to find, that knowledge could create enormous value.

Artificial intelligence is changing that equation.

Information is becoming easier to access than at any point in history. We can research unfamiliar industries, analyse complicated subjects and explore new ideas in minutes.

I think that’s incredibly exciting, but it also raises an interesting question.

If everyone has access to more information, where does the advantage come from?

I think increasingly, it will come from our ability to connect ideas.

Innovation Often Happens Between Industries

We tend to think of innovation as somebody having a completely original idea.

In reality, many great ideas aren’t entirely new. They’re combinations of things that already existed.

The smartphone brought together computing, telecommunications, photography, GPS and the internet.

Modern fintech combined traditional financial services with software and mobile technology.

Digital healthcare is bringing medicine together with telecommunications, data, connected devices and increasingly artificial intelligence.

None of those industries appeared overnight. The opportunity came from recognising what could happen when previously separate capabilities were brought together.

I find that much more interesting than innovation for innovation’s sake.

Sometimes the question isn’t “What can we invent?”

It’s “What could we connect?”

AI Makes Those Connections Easier to Explore

This is one of the reasons I’ve become so interested in artificial intelligence.

I don’t think its greatest value is simply generating content or automating administrative work. Those applications are useful, but they’re only scratching the surface.

What interests me is AI’s ability to help us explore ideas outside our normal areas of expertise.

Someone working in healthcare can examine developments in data science. An entrepreneur can explore behavioural psychology. An investor can investigate technologies they might previously have needed specialist knowledge to understand.

AI doesn’t suddenly make someone an expert in those fields, and we should be careful not to confuse access to information with genuine expertise.

What it does provide is a much easier starting point for curiosity.

You can ask questions, challenge an assumption and follow an idea somewhere unexpected.

Occasionally, that’s where something interesting begins.

Complexity Can Actually Create Opportunity

Earlier this week, I was looking through Harvard’s Atlas of Economic Complexity.

One of the ideas behind economic complexity is that economies develop through combinations of productive knowledge and capabilities. Sophisticated economies can produce things that require many different capabilities to come together.

I think there’s an interesting lesson in that for businesses as well.

We often try to remove complexity, and operationally that’s usually a good thing. Nobody wants unnecessarily complicated systems.

But complex knowledge is different.

The more capabilities you develop, the more combinations become possible.

If you understand technology and healthcare, you may notice an opportunity that someone who understands only one of those areas doesn’t see.

If you understand investment and artificial intelligence, different possibilities emerge.

Add infrastructure, markets, psychology or logistics and suddenly there are thousands of potential combinations.

Knowledge becomes more valuable when it connects.

That’s How I Tend to Think About Projects

When I look at some of the projects we’re currently working on, they may initially appear to sit in very different areas.

IQ Pitch looks at how founders communicate and prepare investment opportunities.

Satorian Systems explores how organisations can connect information and use it to support better decisions.

Other projects we’re developing look at automation, infrastructure and how intelligent systems can help people work more effectively.

The common thread isn’t necessarily the industry.

It’s the problem we’re trying to solve.

How can technology take something complicated and make it easier for a person to understand, communicate or act upon?

Once you start thinking that way, ideas from one project often influence another.

A lesson learned about presenting information to an investor might influence how information should be presented to a business leader.

Something learned about decision-making in one industry may apply surprisingly well somewhere completely different.

That’s when having several interests stops being a distraction and starts becoming useful.

Expertise Still Matters

There’s an important distinction here.

Connecting ideas doesn’t mean pretending to be an expert in everything.

If anything, I think AI makes genuine expertise more important.

A doctor understands medicine in a way that someone reading information online doesn’t. An engineer understands the practical consequences of a design decision. An experienced investor can recognise things in a founder or market that aren’t obvious from a spreadsheet.

The opportunity is to connect those experts more effectively.

AI can help organise information, identify patterns and make knowledge easier to explore. But experience provides context, and people still need to decide what matters.

That’s why I keep coming back to the idea that AI should enhance human intelligence rather than attempt to replace it.

Knowing Things Is Becoming Easier. Knowing What Matters Isn’t.

We’re moving towards a world where an extraordinary amount of human knowledge can be accessed almost instantly.

I don’t think that makes learning less important.

I think it changes what learning is for.

Memorising information becomes less valuable when information is always available.

Understanding it becomes more valuable.

Knowing which questions to ask becomes more valuable.

Recognising when two seemingly unrelated ideas belong together becomes more valuable.

And having enough curiosity to explore those connections becomes incredibly valuable.

Looking Ahead

I don’t know what the most important businesses of the next twenty years will look like.

That’s part of what makes this period so interesting.

But I suspect many of them won’t emerge from one industry operating in isolation.

They’ll appear where industries intersect.

AI and healthcare.

Technology and infrastructure.

Data and decision-making.

Capital and intelligence.

And probably combinations we haven’t considered yet.

Artificial intelligence is giving us extraordinary tools for exploring those possibilities, but the technology isn’t the whole story.

We still have to decide where to look.

We still have to recognise the problem worth solving.

And we still have to make the connection.

The future may not belong to the people who know the most.

It may belong to the people who can see how what they know connects to everything else.

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