A necessity is a function a company needs but doesn’t compete on. Necessity work still involves judgment—what counts as good enough, which trade-offs to accept, what this particular contract needs—but it’s judgment with a standard answer.
Since the company doesn’t compete on the function, there’s no reason to differ from what everyone else does. The meaningmaking converges on the same store, the same process, and the same contract everyone else has. For a necessity, the floor of best practices is the target.
An intent settled by convention is still a known intent, and turning a known intent into output is execution, even when it feels like judgment to the person doing it. And an LLM produces the standard answer, because it has absorbed every example of it.
So the less a function contributes to competitive advantage, the sooner it hits its point of diminishing returns, the more of its meaningmaking the market has already done, and the further its work slides toward the execution end of the spectrum.
Advantages work the other way around. The intent stays open, because differing from the standard answer is the whole point: all good strategies are unique.