CONCEPT
Intangible Capital (Brynjolfsson)
The organizational knowledge, human skills, institutional processes, and relational networks that constitute the majority of modern firm value and the bulk of AI-era productive capacity — and that remain systematically invisible to standard accounting.
Intangible capital is the category of productive assets — organizational capabilities, human knowledge, institutional processes, brand equity, relational networks, accumulated know-how — that constitute the majority of modern firm value but do not appear on balance sheets. Brynjolfsson's research demonstrated that the gap between firms' book value and market value had widened to unprecedented levels by the early 2020s, and that this gap represented intangible capital: everything that made firms productive but that accounting systems could not record. AI both is a form of intangible capital and depends entirely on the quality of the complementary intangible capital surrounding it. A large language model in isolation has limited economic value. The model combined with organizational culture, human judgment, institutional trust, and accumulated domain knowledge produces transformative value. The measurement failure around intangibles is not an accounting inconvenience — it is a strategic blindness that produces systematic underinvestment.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The measurement crisis operates at