Benchmark says data will be AI's next $1 trillion category and the growth backs the claim. But the money is not buying services. It is buying human judgment, permanently.
Calling this a services market may be the first accounting mistake.
We’ve done something similar for years with documentation and process design: treating as overhead work that actually builds institutional infrastructure.
But AI adds a more interesting wrinkle. You can pay for the work, contribute the judgment, and still not own the asset being created.
So the question isn’t only whether this is really capex disguised as opex. It’s whose capex is it?
Companies may be celebrating AI ROI while quietly helping build someone else’s most valuable asset.
If the money is buying human judgment permanently, the valuation question is what kind of judgment holds its price. The pattern I keep seeing in engineering is that judgment which is expensive to verify holds, and judgment which is cheap to verify collapses fast. Faros AI, across 22,000 developers, found throughput per developer up 33.7% while median code review time rose 441.5%. The generation side got commoditised and the adjudication side got scarcer and more valuable in the same quarter. Any task-economy business whose moat is labelling rather than adjudicating is buying the half that deflates.
Buying human judgment is the only way to turn raw data into a security outcome. We are moving past the era where a single source of truth suffices. Analysts now curate a mosaic of inputs to build context, which is why organizations adopt new feeds to sit alongside their existing stack rather than swapping them out. This additive approach creates a unique defensive posture that is far more resilient than any single vendor could provide. When you treat judgment as the core asset, the data becomes the fuel for a much more sophisticated operation.
Calling this a services market may be the first accounting mistake.
We’ve done something similar for years with documentation and process design: treating as overhead work that actually builds institutional infrastructure.
But AI adds a more interesting wrinkle. You can pay for the work, contribute the judgment, and still not own the asset being created.
So the question isn’t only whether this is really capex disguised as opex. It’s whose capex is it?
Companies may be celebrating AI ROI while quietly helping build someone else’s most valuable asset.
If the money is buying human judgment permanently, the valuation question is what kind of judgment holds its price. The pattern I keep seeing in engineering is that judgment which is expensive to verify holds, and judgment which is cheap to verify collapses fast. Faros AI, across 22,000 developers, found throughput per developer up 33.7% while median code review time rose 441.5%. The generation side got commoditised and the adjudication side got scarcer and more valuable in the same quarter. Any task-economy business whose moat is labelling rather than adjudicating is buying the half that deflates.
Buying human judgment is the only way to turn raw data into a security outcome. We are moving past the era where a single source of truth suffices. Analysts now curate a mosaic of inputs to build context, which is why organizations adopt new feeds to sit alongside their existing stack rather than swapping them out. This additive approach creates a unique defensive posture that is far more resilient than any single vendor could provide. When you treat judgment as the core asset, the data becomes the fuel for a much more sophisticated operation.
https://cyrilsimonnet.substack.com/p/nobody-replaces-a-threat-intelligence?utm_source=substor&utm_medium=substack&utm_campaign=comment