Everything Is an Asset. We Just Haven't Learned to See It That Way.
By John R. Kennedy ·
Rethinking value, ownership, and responsibility in the age of artificial intelligence
When most people hear the word asset, they probably think about something they own. A house, a vehicle, an investment account, or perhaps a business. These are things we can assign a monetary value to, insure against loss, and eventually sell or transfer to someone else. We've become accustomed to measuring their worth because our financial systems depend upon it, and most of us understand that protecting these possessions is part of being responsible for them.
I've spent years thinking about assets differently, largely because my experience working with technology and businesses has repeatedly shown me how much value exists outside the things we traditionally measure. I believe nearly everything in our lives can be understood as an asset, although not necessarily in the financial sense. Our knowledge, relationships, experiences, reputation, and even the time we have available contribute value to our lives. Some of these things can be measured in dollars, while others are valuable precisely because no amount of money could replace them.
Consider a family photograph. To someone unfamiliar with the people in the picture, it might be worth very little. But to a family that has lost someone in that photograph, it could be among their most treasured possessions. The photograph itself hasn't changed, and its financial value may be negligible, but its importance is inseparable from the people and memories associated with it. That distinction has always fascinated me because it suggests that value isn't simply a characteristic of something we possess. Value often emerges from the relationship between an asset and the people who depend upon it, and those relationships can change dramatically over time.
A photograph that seems ordinary today may become irreplaceable decades from now. A conversation that appears unimportant when it takes place may later provide insight into a decision, a relationship, or a moment in someone's life that can never be recreated. We rarely know which experiences will become meaningful to us in the future, and I suspect that uncertainty is one reason we so frequently underestimate the value of information while we're creating it.
I've seen similar situations throughout my career working with businesses, particularly smaller organizations where much of the knowledge necessary to operate successfully exists in the minds of a relatively small number of people. A company may have spent years developing relationships with customers, refining its processes, and learning from mistakes, yet very little of that experience may be formally documented. The business knows how to operate because its people know how to operate, and as long as those people remain available, the arrangement can work remarkably well.
The problem often becomes apparent when someone leaves.
Imagine an employee who has spent twenty years working for a small company. Over that time, they've developed an understanding of the customers, learned which problems are likely to recur, and become familiar with the reasoning behind decisions that may have been made long before other employees arrived. They might recognize a problem simply because something doesn't feel right, drawing on years of experience that would be difficult to explain in a written procedure.
When that person retires or unexpectedly leaves the organization, the company may discover that it has lost considerably more than an employee. It has lost access to knowledge, relationships, and judgment that were never adequately preserved. The financial statements may have reflected the employee's compensation, but they probably never captured the full value of what that person contributed.
I think this reveals a limitation in how we've traditionally understood assets. We tend to recognize value most readily when it can be purchased, sold, or measured, even though much of what makes an organization successful cannot be easily separated from the people who created it.
That doesn't mean I consider people property or believe their worth should be reduced to their economic contributions. Quite the opposite. People are the source of much of the value that exists around us, and their importance extends far beyond anything a business or financial institution could measure. Their knowledge, creativity, judgment, relationships, and experiences shape the organizations and communities in which they participate. When I think about assets, I begin with people because so much of everything else we value ultimately depends upon them.
This perspective has also influenced how I think about information.
For decades, businesses have invested heavily in technology intended to collect, store, and protect data. We maintain databases, create backups, purchase security systems, and establish procedures to ensure that important records remain available. These investments are necessary, but I've often wondered whether we've become better at preserving information than understanding its value.
An organization might retain twenty years of customer correspondence without having any practical way to use the knowledge contained in those conversations. It may preserve thousands of documents while losing the reasoning behind the decisions they describe. Employees might spend hours searching for information that technically exists somewhere within the organization but has become difficult to locate or understand.
The records survive, yet much of their potential value remains inaccessible.
Our personal lives aren't much different. We accumulate photographs, messages, documents, financial records, and countless other pieces of information across an expanding collection of devices and online services. Each application serves a particular purpose, and we generally organize our information according to the technology we happen to be using rather than the relationships between the things we're preserving.
A photograph may be stored in one service while the conversation explaining its significance exists in another. Important family information might be buried in an email account, and the documents needed to understand it could be stored somewhere else entirely. Individually, these records may be easy enough to find, but understanding how they relate to one another often requires knowledge that exists only in someone's memory.
I find this particularly interesting because the information itself may become more valuable as time passes, even while our ability to understand it gradually diminishes. The people who remember the circumstances surrounding a photograph may no longer be available to explain it. The employee who understands why a business adopted a particular procedure may have retired years earlier. A decision that once seemed obvious can become difficult to understand when the circumstances that produced it have been forgotten.
In many cases, the information hasn't been lost. What we've lost is the context necessary to recognize its significance.
Artificial intelligence has the potential to change this relationship between information and understanding. For the first time, we're developing technology that can examine enormous collections of information, identify connections between records, and help us explore knowledge that might otherwise remain buried. An AI assistant could potentially help a business recover the reasoning behind an old decision or recognize that a problem encountered today resembles one solved years earlier. It might help a family organize generations of photographs and correspondence into a history that would have been difficult to assemble manually.
What interests me most about these possibilities is that the technology isn't necessarily creating new information. In many cases, it's helping us discover value that already existed but remained difficult to access.
However, the usefulness of that discovery depends heavily on the quality of the information being examined.
If an organization has accumulated years of incomplete, contradictory, or poorly maintained records, AI won't automatically transform those records into a reliable understanding of the business. It may identify useful patterns, but it can also draw conclusions from information that was never accurate or has become outdated. And as we've explored in earlier writings, even perfectly preserved information can be misunderstood when the context surrounding it is missing.
This is why I've come to think about the relationship between people, information, and AI in a particular order.
People come first because they're the source of the experiences, relationships, and intentions that give information its significance. The quality of that information comes next because any system attempting to understand or act upon it must have a reliable foundation. Artificial intelligence follows because its value depends upon the people it serves and the information it has available.
I don't see AI as the starting point. I see it as an extraordinarily powerful capability that becomes more useful when we understand the assets we're asking it to work with.
This distinction matters because much of the current conversation about AI begins with the technology itself. Businesses are encouraged to identify opportunities for automation, employees are learning how to write better prompts, and individuals are experimenting with assistants that promise to make everyday tasks easier. I welcome much of this enthusiasm, but I sometimes wonder whether we're moving too quickly toward what AI can do without first considering what we want it to accomplish.
A business might begin by asking how AI could reduce the time employees spend responding to customers. That's a reasonable question, particularly when repetitive tasks consume resources that could be used more productively. But if we begin by considering the value of the customer relationship, we might approach the problem differently. We may discover that the most important objective isn't simply answering questions faster, but preserving the knowledge, continuity, and personal understanding that make the relationship valuable.
Artificial intelligence could still play an important role, perhaps an even greater one, but the purpose of using it would be clearer.
The same principle applies to our personal lives. An AI assistant might help us organize photographs, manage schedules, or retrieve information from years of correspondence. Those conveniences have value, but I think the larger opportunity lies in helping people preserve and understand the experiences that make their lives unique.
I've often thought about how much knowledge disappears when someone dies. Families inherit possessions, financial accounts, and sometimes carefully prepared estate documents, but they may have little access to the stories and reasoning that explain the significance of what was left behind. A collection of photographs can survive for generations while the identities of the people pictured gradually become uncertain. Important decisions may be remembered without anyone understanding the circumstances that led to them.
We have developed sophisticated systems for transferring financial assets between generations, yet many of our most meaningful personal assets remain dependent upon memory and chance.
Artificial intelligence may eventually help us preserve more of that knowledge, but doing so responsibly will require us to think carefully about ownership, access, and the rights of the people whose information becomes part of those histories.
A family photograph may be meaningful to several people, each with a legitimate interest in how it is preserved or shared. A conversation belongs to the experiences of everyone who participated, even if the record happens to be stored in one person's account. A business may possess information about its customers, but possession doesn't necessarily give it unlimited authority to use that information for unrelated purposes.
These relationships complicate the idea of ownership because information doesn't always behave like physical property. A vehicle can generally be transferred from one owner to another, but information can concern multiple people simultaneously, and copying it doesn't remove it from the original location.
I believe recognizing information as an asset should make us more attentive to these distinctions rather than less concerned about them. Understanding that something has value doesn't automatically establish who should control it or how it should be used. In fact, the more valuable information becomes, the more important those questions are likely to be.
This is especially relevant as AI systems gain the ability to act on information rather than simply retrieve or summarize it. An assistant that understands a person's financial circumstances might provide useful guidance, but that doesn't mean it should have unrestricted authority to move money. A system that understands an organization's customers might help improve service, but that doesn't justify sharing customer information with every connected application.
The ability to recognize value and the authority to act upon it are separate considerations, and I suspect that distinction will become increasingly important as artificial intelligence develops.
There's also something about the traditional concept of asset management that I believe deserves reconsideration in this new environment.
When we purchase a house, we generally recognize that maintaining it protects its value. We repair problems, maintain insurance, and preserve records that may become important when we eventually sell or transfer the property. We understand that neglect can reduce the value of something even when we continue to own it.
Information is different because its deterioration isn't always obvious.
A document may remain exactly where we stored it while gradually becoming less useful because the circumstances it describes have changed. A customer record may still be available even though the contact information is outdated. A photograph may remain perfectly preserved while the knowledge of who appears in it disappears.
In each case, the underlying information survives, but something about its value has changed.
Artificial intelligence may make these weaknesses more visible, particularly when systems attempt to combine information collected over many years. It may also magnify the consequences of neglect by making it possible to act upon outdated or misunderstood information much more quickly than we could in the past.
I think this creates an opportunity to develop a more thoughtful approach to managing the information we accumulate. Rather than treating data as something we simply store until we need it, we could begin considering how its accuracy, context, accessibility, and permitted uses affect its long-term value.
That doesn't mean everyone needs to become a data management expert or spend their lives cataloging personal information. Most people have neither the time nor the desire to do that, and technology should help reduce the burden rather than create another one.
What interests me is the possibility that we could become more deliberate about preserving the things that matter without allowing the process of preservation to overwhelm our lives.
I return to the family photograph because it illustrates the idea in such a familiar way. The image may have little monetary value, but its importance can grow as the people and experiences associated with it become part of a family's history. Preserving the photograph is useful, yet preserving the story behind it may be just as important. And ensuring that future generations can find and understand both may ultimately determine whether the asset retains its meaning.
The same principle applies to businesses, institutions, and communities. Information becomes more useful when we understand where it came from, why it matters, and how it relates to the people who created or depend upon it.
As AI becomes increasingly capable, I expect we'll hear more about the extraordinary things it can accomplish. Some of those advances will be genuinely transformative, and I believe they will create opportunities that are difficult to imagine today.
But I also think there's a quieter transformation taking place beneath the technological excitement.
We're beginning to develop the ability to recognize, connect, and preserve forms of value that have always existed but were often difficult to measure or use. Knowledge that once disappeared when someone retired may become easier to retain. Family histories that were scattered across generations may become easier to understand. Information that organizations collected without fully appreciating its significance may become useful in ways nobody originally anticipated.
Whether these developments improve our lives will depend on more than the intelligence of the systems we create. They'll depend on how carefully we consider the people involved, the reliability of the information, and the responsibilities associated with using it.
For me, that's where Asset Value begins. It's not simply an argument that information should be treated as valuable property, nor is it an attempt to assign a price to every aspect of human experience. It's a way of looking at the world that encourages us to recognize the value already present in our lives and to consider what happens when that value is overlooked, misunderstood, or lost.
I believe artificial intelligence will become one of the most powerful tools we've ever developed for working with those assets. But the technology cannot determine their importance for us simply by measuring what it can observe. A photograph, a relationship, a lifetime of experience, or the knowledge accumulated within a small business may carry significance that isn't apparent from the information alone.
Understanding that significance requires us to begin with the people whose lives give those assets meaning. Once we recognize what matters, we can become more thoughtful about preserving the information that represents it and more deliberate about how we use AI to make that information useful.
If we approach the future in that order, I believe AI can help us do something more meaningful than simply accomplish familiar tasks faster. It can help us recognize and preserve value that previous generations often had no practical way to protect.
Continue reading: When AI Gets the Words Right but the Meaning Wrong