There's a concept I've been exploring with the Evolution Unleashed community that deserves wider attention: the dissolution of the execution layer.
What Is the Execution Layer?
In any business, work happens at different levels:
Strategy Layer: Deciding what to do and why. Setting direction. Making judgment calls about priorities and values.
Execution Layer: Doing the work. Writing the emails. Creating the content. Processing the data. Following the procedures.
Verification Layer: Checking that the work meets standards. Quality control. Making sure outputs align with intentions.
For most of business history, humans have operated across all three layers. We decided what to do, did it, and checked our work.
The Dissolution
AI is dissolving the execution layer. The middle part, the actual doing, is increasingly handled by systems rather than people.
This doesn't mean humans become irrelevant. It means human value concentrates at the strategy and verification layers. You become more valuable for your judgment, your taste, your ability to set direction and evaluate outcomes.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Consider content creation. The old model:
- You decide what content to create (strategy)
- You write the content (execution)
- You review and refine (verification)
The new model:
- You decide what content to create (strategy)
- AI systems draft, research, and assemble (execution)
- You review, refine, and approve (verification)
Your time on step 2 drops dramatically. Your value in steps 1 and 3 increases.
The Implications for Business Owners
Your judgment becomes your product. The ability to know what good looks like, to set appropriate direction, to make nuanced decisions, these skills become more valuable as execution becomes automated.
Speed becomes a competitive advantage. When execution is fast and cheap, the bottleneck shifts to decision-making. Businesses that can make good decisions quickly will outpace those stuck in analysis paralysis.
Systems thinking matters more than task execution. Understanding how to design workflows, how to connect agents, how to build systems that scale, these become core entrepreneurial skills.
The Opportunity
Here's what excites me about this shift: it democratizes capability.
Previously, if you wanted to produce content at scale, you needed a team. If you wanted to process data systematically, you needed analysts. If you wanted to maintain consistent communication, you needed staff.
Now, a solo entrepreneur with good judgment and orchestration skills can operate at a scale that previously required a team. The execution layer that used to require human hands can be handled by systems you design.
The Challenge
The challenge is that this shift requires new skills. Not technical skills, necessarily. Thinking skills.
You need to be able to:
- Clearly articulate what good looks like
- Design workflows that can be automated
- Evaluate outputs against your standards
- Make judgment calls about edge cases
These are learnable skills. But they require intentional development.
Where to Start
If you're feeling the pull of this shift, here's my suggestion:
Pick one workflow in your business that's repetitive and well-defined. Something you do regularly that follows a predictable pattern.
Document it completely. Write down every step. Note every decision point. Capture what "good" looks like at each stage.
Identify the human-required moments. Where in this workflow do you actually need human judgment? Where are you just executing steps that could be automated?
Build the system. Start simple. Get one part working. Then expand.
The execution layer is dissolving. The question is whether you'll be the one designing the systems that replace it, or the one being replaced by them.