The No. 1 Business Skill You’ll Need in 2025

It doesn’t matter if you’re an entrepreneur or technologist or just someone trying to innovate at your company. If you’re doing new things to keep yourself on the cutting edge rather than getting sliced up and left behind in a million pieces, the rules are changing drastically. Allow me to connect the dots. Innovation Died This Year and No One Told You 2024 is going to be remembered as the year that promises around artificial intelligence became the go-to substitute for real technical innovation. You can lump the marketing machines for generative AI, machine learning, and artificial general intelligence into the same bucket. And then throw that bucket at a canvas and sell it for billions of dollars. Now, for those unaware, I’m not anti-AI. I was on the AI commercialization train over a decade ago, we sold to a private equity firm, and then, like any good entrepreneur, I went and did other things. But as the generative AI bubble was inflating—and all the venture capital money was being sucked into that bubble, and the venture and innovation arms of Google, Microsoft, and Apple leaped into the age of miracles—it quickly became obvious that the scraps left over for normie entrepreneurs and technologists solving complex problems with advancements in technology that weren’t so artificial, those scraps just weren’t going to be enough to compete with “AI for… whatever, it doesn’t matter, just write me a check… LLMs!!!” The money consolidated quickly, and it helped accelerate a decline in the overall VC investor ranks, as a crop of new venture capitalists that had sprouted during the post-pandemic, pre-inflation era of cheap money suddenly decided that there were better, safer, saner options, and those vests were kind stupid-looking anyway—and so they quit. But as it turned out, those corporate options weren’t so safe after all. See, the corporate world was innovating too. And so here we are, where your entrepreneurial and innovation skills are withering on the vine, because those jobs have all been cut while the new jobs are being created by AI and filled by AI, skipping over your proven, real-world experience while it scans your résumé for AI skills to help AI build more AI. Here’s the Counterplay We already know it’s unwise to fight AI with AI, and I don’t want to be the millionth person telling you that you need to learn AI to compete with AI. Nah, I’m going to get a little ahead of the curve on this, I’ll speculate recklessly, and so some of it might seem like nonsense. Oh, also, if you’re of a certain age, I’m going to slam a Billy Joel song into your brain for a few days, so I apologize in advance. Seriously, stop reading now if you’re over 40 and you’d like to be able to think clearly over the next 48 hours. Honesty Is Such a Lonely Word You were warned. This is the skill you need. I’m serious. I’m not talking about not lying. I’m not your mom. I’m talking about how to approach everything that you do on the innovation and technology fronts, from building to positioning to communication to marketing and selling. I’m talking about intellectual honesty. Let me go to Wikipedia, because sometimes when I put those words together people think I’m calling them stupid liars and they want to punch me even more than usual. Scrolling down the definition a bit: “Within the realm of business, intellectual honesty entails basing decisions on factual evidence, consistently pursuing truth in problem-solving, and setting aside personal aspirations.” Now, in future articles, I’ll cover some of the more rubber-meets-road applications of intellectual honesty, but since our time together today is short, I’m just gonna high-level it. Ideas Are Back I actually like this definition better, it’s from something called Wikiversity: “Intellectual honesty is honesty in the acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas.” Yeah, ideas are valuable again. When people give business advice, one of their go-to moves is to talk about how ideas are cheap, plentiful, and how everyone has loads of them so they’re worth nothing. This is kinda true, but kinda true is never actually true. That advice is usually given in the context of the best business idea in the universe being useless if you don’t execute on it properly. But the reverse is true too. The best minds with the most experience doing everything right cannot save a terrible idea from being terrible. In a post-AI world—and let’s face it, we’re already there—the proper “acquisition, analysis, and transmission of ideas” is the critical business skill to keep oneself, one’s product, and one’s company on the cutting edge, AI or not. That means talk is cheap, not the idea itself. Show, Don’t Tell You need to be able to show—show the value of the idea, as well as the manifestation of that idea into reality and the level of execution required to get there, and finally the coming-to-fruition that results in an exponential return on the resources and investment poured into that idea. Show, don’t tell. Because anything you can just say, AI can do, at least in the minds of the people you need backing from. You can’t just slam an idea and a plan into a pitch deck or business proposal anymore. The first question in their minds, whether they ask it or not, is “Why can’t we just have AI do this?” You’ll need to be able to counter that, with intellectual honesty. Let’s get honest. Where Did You Get That Idea? On the idea acquisition front, bandwagoning is out. And with that, first-mover advantage is probably a thing of the past as well. Ideas that are simple, unoriginal, or just a twist on an existing success are going to be far more likely to be sniped by an AI-driven entity cashing in on any company’s initial traction. If an idea has weak intellectual property prospects or you can’t develop a strong competitive moat, it’s copyable. And if there’s one thing that no one can argue AI doesn’t do well, it’s copy, at speed. Is Your Idea Any Good? I do get a dozen ideas a day, and on initial analysis, almost all of them are immediately identifiable as crap. It’s the ones that aren’t immediately identifiable that get me in trouble. I can spend years stuck on a bad idea. And I only do this because I also have the experience of taking years to discover one little tweak that turns a bad idea into a brilliant idea. I can’t do that without the idea being on the market. But AI can determine a million of those little tweaks, try them, and maybe find the right one before you finish breakfast. You need to know and be sure of the value of your idea, and fast. Can You Communicate the Value of Your Idea? As the traditional pitch deck heads to the dustbin, so goes the traditional elevator pitch. And while I’ll have more on the demise of the entrepreneurial pitch play in future posts, the only thing that speaks louder than words is numbers. And those numbers only come with action. It has always been important to focus primarily on those tasks that lead to growth—in customers, revenue, and profit—but now it’s mandatory. It’s time to drop all pretense of traditional business models and metrics that don’t contribute to growth, and preferably rapid growth. The competition is doing it. They’re cutting everything that isn’t directly responsible for revenue and replacing it with… AI. You have to do it with… you. Can you make that happen? Be honest. And please follow along as I head down that path. EXPERT OPINION BY JOE PROCOPIO, FOUNDER, JOEPROCOPIO.COM @JPROCO