Leverage Accrual Audit
Reassess where advantage moves as technical capabilities commoditize.
- Difficulty
- Advanced
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- 94%
The Leverage Accrual Audit asks a recurring strategic question: when an agent makes a previously difficult capability available to everyone, where does durable advantage move next? Begin by inventorying the tasks, expertise, assets, and relationships that currently create value. Assess which tasks can now be automated reliably and how quickly competitors will gain the same access. Treat those capabilities as candidates for commoditization rather than permanent differentiation. Then identify scarce complements that become more valuable, such as proprietary data, distribution, trust, brand, customer relationships, judgment, or a distinctive point of view. Reconfigure roles and investment around those leverage points while continuing to use agents for execution. Repeat the audit as models, tools, costs, and context capacity change.
Origin
Extracted from Marketing Against The Grain
Core principles
- 01Capabilities lose leverage when agents make them widely accessible.
- 02Reevaluate advantage whenever a tool automates a valued task.
- 03Move attention toward scarce complements rather than commoditized execution.
- 04Brand, connection, point of view, and human trust can gain relative value.
- 05Repeat the audit because the capability frontier changes rapidly.
How to run it
- 1
Inventory current leverage
List the capabilities, assets, relationships, and workflows that currently make the role or company unusually effective.
Pro tip Distinguish true advantage from work that is merely time-consuming.
Watch out Effort and scarcity are not the same thing.
- 2
Test the automation frontier
Use current agents to determine which valued tasks they can complete accurately, cheaply, and repeatedly.
Pro tip Evaluate real outputs rather than relying on demonstrations or predictions.
Watch out A successful one-shot demo does not establish production reliability.
- 3
Estimate commoditization
Assess whether competitors will soon have comparable access to the same automated capability.
Pro tip Consider tool cost, required expertise, data access, and integration difficulty.
Watch out Do not declare a capability commoditized while access remains narrow or quality remains inconsistent.
- 4
Find scarce complements
Identify what becomes more valuable when technical execution is abundant, including trust, distribution, data, relationships, and point of view.
Pro tip Look for assets strengthened rather than replaced by automation.
Watch out Generic claims about being “human” are not a defensible strategy without concrete value.
- 5
Reallocate effort
Automate the increasingly common work and invest saved attention in the scarce complements that sustain differentiation.
Pro tip Redesign metrics and responsibilities so people are rewarded for the new source of leverage.
Watch out Retain oversight for consequential or failure-prone automated work.
- 6
Repeat the audit
Reassess the frontier after meaningful model, agent, cost, or integration improvements.
Pro tip Schedule reviews around capability shifts rather than arbitrary annual planning cycles.
Watch out A leverage map becomes stale quickly in a fast-moving market.
In the wild
A marketing team finds that agents can research, draft, and format routine campaigns. Instead of competing on raw content volume, it redirects people toward customer insight, original evidence, trusted distribution, editorial judgment, and a distinctive brand point of view while agents handle repeatable production.
→ The team captures automation gains without relying on capabilities competitors can easily reproduce.
Common mistakes
Protecting yesterday's scarcity
A capability that once required specialist labor may cease to differentiate when reliable agents make it broadly available.
Assuming all technical work is commoditized
Current agents still have capacity, reliability, security, and integration limits, so the audit must use evidence rather than hype.
Is it for you?
Best for
Leaders, founders, and professionals deciding where to invest as AI agents absorb more technical and operational work.
Not ideal for
Organizations using speculative automation claims to abandon capabilities that remain essential, regulated, or poorly automated.
From the transcript
“where does the leverage accrue to is is I think a really important thing to try to figure out.”
“brand connection point of view, the human aspect is going to be more and more important because the technical aspect will become more commoditized over…”
“you have to obsess about how you're going to get leverage for your company or your role.”
From the episode
This FREE AI Agent Does a Team’s Work in 35 Min (Manus AI)