The Signal Layer: What to Build When Anything Can Be Built — Lena Hall, Akamai
AI commoditizes execution, making human vision the only remaining competitive differentiator.
“The cost of the average just went to zero and so did its value.”
Lena Hall argues that AI's abundance has equalized execution speed across competitors, collapsing the value of 'being good at AI' as a moat. Because AI trains on historical data and answers the same prompts identically, it acts as a convergence machine that homogenizes products and strategies. The new leverage point — what she calls the 'signal layer' — is human-directed vision: deciding what to build and why, not how to build it fast.