In any domain, there are naive questions and informed questions. Competence means knowing enough to ask questions that an expert would recognize as sophisticated—and that AI can answer usefully.
Not “How does ML work?” but “What’s the tradeoff between precision and recall here?”
2. Judge AI Output Quality
AI produces output that ranges from excellent to subtly wrong. Competence means being able to evaluate quality, spot errors, and recognize when something needs human review.
Not accepting everything AI says, but “This analysis is missing the regulatory angle—let me add that.”
3. Know When AI Is Wrong
AI hallucinates, oversimplifies, and sometimes confidently asserts falsehoods. Competence means having enough domain knowledge to catch these failures.
Not trusting AI blindly, but recognizing “That citation doesn’t exist—AI made it up.”
Threshold vs. Expertise
This threshold is significantly lower than expertise. You don’t need 10,000 hours—you need perhaps 1,000 hours of focused engagement, combined with active AI partnership that accelerates your learning.
And critically: AI keeps lowering this threshold. As AI systems improve, the baseline competence required to operate effectively in a domain decreases. What took 1,000 hours of study in 2024 may take 500 hours in 2026—because AI handles more of the prerequisite knowledge.
Why This Matters
90% less investment than expertise to reach productive engagement
8 domains become feasible to maintain simultaneously
AI accelerates the path to threshold
Threshold keeps dropping as AI improves
The implication: The octagon is newly possible because the competence threshold for productive engagement with multiple domains has dropped enough that maintaining eight simultaneously is achievable for the first time.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
