UpTrajectory Review

Santalo's argument in Entrepreneur is short but pointed: for roughly a hundred years, organizations have promoted and listened to the people who could frame, format, and present ideas well — the polished deck, the crisp memo, the confident pitch. Generative AI has made that packaging function nearly free. Anyone can now produce a professional-looking document in seconds, which means the skill that once filtered who got heard inside a company is losing its gatekeeping power. What remains scarce, he suggests, is the underlying thinking — the judgment, the original insight, the ability to actually decide what is worth saying.

For a small-business operator, this cuts deeper than it does at a large firm. When you have ten or thirty employees, you already know who your 'good communicators' are, and you have probably been over-weighting their input in hiring, in meetings, and in promotions without fully realizing it. AI doesn't just change how your team writes — it changes how you should evaluate them. The quiet analyst who produces excellent thinking but mediocre slides may now be more valuable than the charismatic presenter whose main gift was formatting. That has real implications for who you promote, whose advice you weight, and how you structure feedback.

What is genuinely new here is not the observation that AI automates writing — that is well covered — but the framing of communication skill as a historical filter that is now collapsing. We think this is directionally right, with one caveat: packaging is not purely cosmetic. The ability to structure an argument, to know what an audience needs to hear first, is itself a form of thinking, not just decoration on top of it. The risk for operators is not that they suddenly start hearing brilliant but inarticulate people — it is that they conflate 'AI can format this' with 'the thinking behind it must be good.' Sloppy reasoning can now also arrive beautifully packaged.

The second-order effects run in both directions. Junior employees who were still learning to communicate may find their relative position improves if their ideas are judged on substance — or worsens if senior staff use AI to sharpen their own output and widen the gap again. There is also a cultural cost: if everyone suspects a polished document might be AI-assisted, trust in written communication itself erodes, and organizations may drift back toward valuing whoever performs well live, in a meeting, unrehearsed. That shift would favor a different personality type, not necessarily a better thinker.

The practical move is to audit how your evaluation systems implicitly reward presentation over substance. Start by looking at your last three hiring or promotion decisions and asking what evidence actually drove them. Then change your process: ask candidates or team members to explain their reasoning verbally before they submit anything written, or deliberately strip formatting from internal proposals so ideas compete on merit. AI has made the wrapper free. Your job as an operator is to make sure you are still pricing the contents correctly.

“For a century, work rewarded people who could package ideas neatly. AI makes packaging free, and that changes who gets ahead.” — Entrepreneur

Takeaway: Audit your hiring and promotion criteria now — if polished communication was doing the filtering, AI just made that filter useless.