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A friend of mine wrote something a few months ago that rewired how I think about managing people. "Once something is learnable, your quirk loses its innocence. Because then 'I can't' becomes 'I won't.'"

Sit with that for a second if you manage a team.

For most of my career, the best people I hired had one thing in common. They figured things out. They didn't wait for a training doc or a Slack message from their manager. They researched. They Googled. They found the answer. I used to think that was resourcefulness. A skill you either had or you didn't.

I was wrong about what I was actually selecting for.

Willingness, not ability

The people who "figured things out" weren't smarter. They weren't better researchers. They had an intolerance for not knowing. They refused to stay stuck. That was the differentiator. Not capability. Will.

AI made this visible in a way that's impossible to ignore.

Any knowledge worker can now get an expert-level answer to almost any question in under 60 seconds. Legal research. Tax strategy. Code debugging. Competitive analysis. Campaign structure. Measurement frameworks. 75% of global knowledge workers now use AI tools regularly. Daily usage among knowledge workers has more than tripled since 2024, hitting 38% in 2025.

The barrier to knowledge has collapsed. Which means every claim of "I don't know how" is now a choice.

The uncomfortable reframe

Most workplace incompetence is actually insubordination.

That's a hard sentence. I know. But think about your team for a minute.

The person who can't figure out the attribution model isn't lacking training. They have access to the same tools you do. The person who consistently produces surface-level analysis isn't incapable of depth. They're choosing not to go deeper. The person who says the CRM is "too complicated" has a conversational AI that can walk them through every field, every workflow, every integration, step by step.

"I can't" used to be a reasonable statement. Now it's almost always "I won't."

Amjad Masad, who built Replit into a $9 billion company, put it plainly: "The particular skill is not the bottleneck anymore. It is how ambitious you are, how generative you are, how creative you are, and how good you are at utilizing these tools." He's watching it happen inside his own company — designers shipping code, engineers shipping design, salespeople shipping code. The roles are collapsing because the tools made the skills accessible. What's left is whether you bother.

Tobi Lütke figured this out before most CEOs. His leaked memo at Shopify didn't just suggest employees use AI. He made it a requirement. Before any team can request additional headcount, they have to demonstrate that AI can't do the work. He added AI usage to performance reviews. He wrote that he's seen people "approach implausible tasks, ones we wouldn't even have chosen to tackle before, with reflexive and brilliant usage of AI to get 100X the work done."

100X. Not 10%. Not 2X. One hundred times.

The gap between the willing and the unwilling has never been wider. And it's accelerating.

What this means for your org

If you're a CMO running a marketing team in 2026, the training-and-development playbook is broken. Sending someone to a workshop to learn a platform they could master in an afternoon with Claude or ChatGPT isn't development. It's theater.

The real conversation you need to have with underperformers is uncomfortable but honest. It's not "what training do you need?" It's "what's actually stopping you?"

Because the answer, increasingly, is nothing. Nothing is stopping them except the decision to not do it.

Only 33% of managers and executives use AI tools frequently, compared to 16% of individual contributors. That gap should alarm you. Your team is watching whether you use these tools yourself. If you don't, you've quietly given them permission not to. I wrote about this same dynamic in The Proficiency Gap when Block laid off 4,000 people and the stock went up 24%. The market has already priced in what most professionals haven't.

Lütke was blunt about this in his memo. He said it's "unfair" not to tell people that AI proficiency is now the game. That the people who master these tools will sequester the best careers to themselves. He wasn't threatening. He was being honest about what's already happening.

The flip side

This cuts both ways, and the upside is real.

If incompetence is really unwillingness, then competence is just willingness plus time. The knowledge barriers are gone. The gatekeepers are gone. The experts are in your pocket. A junior marketer who is genuinely willing can now operate at a level that took a decade of experience two years ago.

That's not a threat to your team. That's an unlock. But only if your culture rewards the willing and stops subsidizing the unwilling. The orgs getting this right have already shifted from conductor-led hierarchies to AI-first operating models where individual leverage matters more than headcount.

The best marketing orgs I work with have already made this shift. They stopped asking "does this person have the skills?" and started asking "does this person have the drive to build skills on demand?" Because in a world where any skill is learnable in an afternoon, the only scarce resource is the will to learn it.

The question

Every CMO has someone on their team who is hiding behind complexity. Hiding behind "I'm not technical." Hiding behind "I haven't been trained on that." Hiding behind the gap between what they could do and what they choose to do.

You know who they are.

The knowledge barrier used to give them cover. That cover is gone. What's left is a simple question that most managers are afraid to ask directly.

Is it that you can't? Or is it that you won't?

The answer changes everything about what you do next.