Rich Schefren has one of the longer track records in online business. He's credited with helping build Agora from $250 million to $1.25 billion in a year, coached people who went on to build DigitalMarketer and ClickFunnels, and published the Internet Business Manifesto in 2006, a document that was downloaded more than five million times.

His argument is worth taking seriously, and not because of who wrote it. Every capability AI gives a business right now, faster drafting, faster analysis, faster execution- is becoming available to every competitor on the same terms. What a competitor cannot buy, rent, or download is the specific judgment behind why one business makes a call, and another doesn't. Schefren's point is that businesses which start capturing that judgment now, rather than losing it every time a chat window closes or an employee leaves, compound an advantage nobody else can replicate.

Businesses that don't will spend the next few years getting faster at being ordinary.

We agree with the direction. We think it's missing a step that matters more as a business grows.

Judgment that lives only in someone's head is not an asset yet. It's an unbooked liability, and the businesses that find this out the hard way usually find out at the worst possible moment: an audit, an insurer's request, a board question, a bigger client's due diligence process. “Trust me, that's my judgment” does not survive contact with any of those. What survives is a record: what was decided, on what basis, who's accountable for it, and where the evidence is.

Klarna is the case that makes this concrete, because it happened to a company with real resources doing this seriously.

In 2024, Klarna's AI customer service assistant was handling work equivalent to roughly 700 employees, and headcount fell 22%, mostly through attrition, while the company celebrated the metrics. By 2025, the CEO was rehiring people specifically for disputes and hardship cases, the calls that need judgment rather than a lookup. Klarna's own explanation focused on what the success metrics failed to measure: speed and average experience, not whether the hard cases were actually being resolved.

Schefren's manifesto adds a second, complementary reading of the same case: the company reduced headcount before it had captured what the departing agents actually knew about handling those hard cases. Both readings point at the same gap. The judgment that made the old system work quietly left the building, and nothing had been built to catch it on the way out.

McKinsey's most recent global AI research, published in August 2026, puts a number on how common that gap is. Eight in ten people say AI has made them individually more productive.

Only 37% of organisations can trace that to a measurable financial result.
The businesses that cross that gap share three things:
They redesigned the workflow around the tool instead of bolting AI onto the old process,
They named someone accountable for the outcome, and
Leadership actually owned the change instead of leaving it to whoever adopted the tool first.

None of those three things is a technology decision. All three are governance decisions wearing a technology costume.

That is where we think Schefren's manifesto and the compliance reality of running a growing business meet. He's arguing, correctly, that AI is about to make judgment the scarcest and most valuable thing a business has. We'd add the part that matters once a business has grown past the point where the founder is the only place that judgment lives: judgment only compounds as an advantage if it's captured with its reasoning attached, in a form somebody other than the person who made the call can actually stand behind.

Context. The basis for the decision. Who owns it. What proof exists. That's not a constraint on using AI well. It's the difference between judgment that's an asset and judgment that's just a story you tell until someone asks you to prove it.

Where this fits

This is precisely the gap Propel Growth's diagnostic work is built to close: mapping which decisions in a business are already running on judgment nobody's written down, and building the record that makes that judgment defensible to a board, an insurer, an auditor, or a bigger client's due diligence team, before someone else forces the question.