Invest in AI, but Keep the Gold

Let us get the respect out of the way, because it is real. AI has changed how we work. It reads faster than we do, drafts faster than we do, and occasionally argues better than we do. Desk research that took a junior team a week in 2019 now takes an afternoon. Any consultant who tells you otherwise is either not using it or not admitting it.

So this is not a piece about AI's limits; it is a piece about ours. And ours have a track record.

The crypto lesson

Every few years something arrives that is real, valuable and new, and a great many intelligent people decide it does not merely add to the world but replaces it. Markets ran this pattern long before boardrooms did, and the most expensive recent rehearsal was crypto. It is worth a minute, because it is the AI story with the names changed.

In 2021 the argument felt airtight: gold was a rock, oil was a liability, and silver was for our grandmother's cutlery. The future was digital, decentralized and borderless, and anyone still holding the old commodities was holding a museum piece.

Five years on, central banks are buying gold by the ton. The world still runs on oil. Silver went into every solar panel and circuit board the digital future needed to exist. And crypto is still here, still real, sitting in serious portfolios. It simply never did the one thing its loudest believers promised: make the physical world optional.

That is the whole lesson. New asset classes get added to the world; they do not subtract the old ones. The people who got hurt were never the ones who bought crypto, but the ones who sold everything else to do it.

AI is the new asset class, not the portfolio

Swap crypto for AI and gold for judgment, and you have the boardroom of 2026. An "AI strategy" is announced. On inspection, it is a procurement decision with a press release attached. Budgets move. People who spent twenty years learning a category are told the model can do that now. Then the model produces a beautifully structured answer to a question nobody in the building was brave enough to phrase properly.

Because the question was always the hard part. In this region especially, the hard part has always been the room. The family shareholder who will not say what he actually wants. The distributor who agrees to everything in the meeting and delivers nothing after it. The consumer who says "premium" in the focus group and buys the private label at the till.

None of that lives in a dataset. It lives in people who were there, who read the silence, who know which number in the deck the CEO will actually look at. That is consulting as we have always known it, and it has not aged. Not the kind that sells you two hundred slides; the kind that sits in the room. It is the gold in the portfolio, still there because it answers to human nature rather than to a product roadmap.

Where the analogy ends, in our favor

Gold and crypto merely coexist; they share a portfolio and ignore each other. AI and judgment do something better: they compound. The model reads two hundred sources by lunch; the consultant knows which three the client will be challenged on. The model is confident everywhere; the consultant knows where in this market confidence is a liability. Speed without judgment is a faster way to be wrong. Judgment without speed is a slower way to be right, and nobody pays for slow anymore.

We have all heard the line: "AI will not take your job; someone using AI will." It is true, and it drops the half that matters. The person who takes your job is not the one who uses AI the most, but the one who knows exactly where it stops. Who runs the model on the desk research, then gets on a plane. Who lets it draft the framework, then deletes the two slides that were technically right and commercially naive. The same holds for companies: the competitor that takes your market will be the one that knew which decisions to hand to the model and which to keep in the room.

That judgment is not a feature you switch on. It is earned over years, with clients who never once asked how elegant your process was.

How we work

At Valiant Growth Makers we invest in AI and use it every day. We are greedy about the leverage.

But we keep the gold: the people who were there, and the instinct that tells us the data is clean but the story is wrong. Then we put the two in the same room.

The model is in from the first hour and never in alone. It brings what it is unmatched at: breadth, speed, the first draft. Our people bring what it cannot: the room, the market from the inside, and the call on which of its answers survive contact with this region. We set out to transform the way businesses build brands, innovate and grow, and that sentence has never named a tool. The tool is whatever gets a client to the truth fastest. Some days that is a model; some days it is a flight.

The Gulf, of all places, understood this early. It is spending more on AI than almost anyone on earth, and it has not stopped pumping.

The organizations that own the next decade will not be the AI-first ones, nor the ones still waiting. They will be the ones that put the new tool and the earned judgment in the same room, and let them argue.