Cheap thinking, expensive manners

Chi mangia solo crepa solo. Whoever eats alone dies alone. My country has a proverb for everything and most of them are a bit dramatic, but this one has been on my mind for weeks, and not because of lunch.

I spent years in risk management, including as head of the function at the World Bank, and what you learn in that job is to look for the thing everybody assumes will stay the same. Right now what everybody assumes is that intelligence will stay expensive. I don't think it will. A credit memo, a first draft of a market note, a clean email in English, Italian and Arabic, these used to take a junior analyst a morning and now they take a prompt and about ten seconds. When the supply of something goes vertical the price follows it down, and the money moves somewhere else. So where does it go?

My answer is people. More precisely, the part of people that a model can't copy, which is how they make you feel when you're sitting across a table from them.

This isn't just a hunch. David Deming at Harvard looked at the American labour market from 1980 onwards and found that nearly all of the job growth came in occupations that lean on social skills, while the jobs that were heavy on maths and light on human contact did poorly. Social skills also paid a wage premium on top of cognitive ability, and that was before anyone had heard of ChatGPT. The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 says employers expect 39% of core skills to change by 2030. Resilience, curiosity and empathy are in their top ten, sitting right next to AI literacy, which tells you something.

Silicon Valley has noticed too. Last November Business Insider covered an etiquette evening that Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures put together at the Four Seasons in San Francisco, about three dozen founders (a lot of them Y Combinator) learning how to dress for investors, what to drink with caviar and how to hold a conversation that isn't about their own startup. Lessin's view is that new technology still needs people to push it into the world, and that charisma opens doors. I read the whole thing as a price signal. The people building the most powerful software we've ever had are paying for lessons in manners!

Italians would find this funny, because we've been long this trade for a few hundred years. Italy is not the most efficient economy in Europe and we know it. Still, Coldiretti puts the value of Italian cuisine around the world at about €251 billion, UNESCO added Italian cooking to its intangible heritage list last December, and Ismea expected agrifood exports to land near €73 billion for 2025, a record, tariffs or no tariffs. Some of that money is for the pasta and the Prosecco, obviously. A lot of it, I'd argue, is for the way we eat them.

In Italy the contract gets signed in the office. The decision gets made at dinner, usually somewhere between il primo and il secondo, or over an aperitivo at seven, once everybody has had a glass and decided whether they actually like you. I've watched this happen far from Italy too, in Washington and in the Gulf. It's due diligence, we just don't call it that.

Economists have a name for what's going on at that table, a costly signal. A signal is believable when it costs you something to send. You wait for buon appetito before touching your fork. You look every person in the eye when someone says brindiamo. You pay the bill quietly on the way back from the restroom so nobody has to fight over it, and if you were the guest you say la prossima volta offro io and then you actually follow through. None of these is difficult. They just take attention, and attention is the one thing nobody has enough of anymore. Spend it on the people at the table and they understand that you care about the relationship more than the deal, which, funnily enough, is usually how you get the deal.

There's a benefit for you as well. Once you know the rules you stop worrying about them, and people can feel that you're relaxed. We call it sentirsi a proprio agio, being comfortable in your own skin, and I've never seen anyone learn it from a webinar.

I won't tell anyone what to buy, that's not my job here. But if AI keeps squeezing the value out of routine thinking, I'd expect pricing power to drift toward businesses and people whose real product is an experience. Hospitality, food, travel, the kind of luxury that lives on ritual more than on logos. And any adviser whose edge is the relationship rather than the report.

For leaders it gets personal. Your team's analysis is going to look more and more like your competitor's, since you're all using the same tools. Your dinners won't. That's where I'd put my money, and my time.

Chi mangia solo crepa solo. Turns out it's also decent risk management.