The Confidence Layer

I don't know where I'll be in five years. And I've been in this business long enough to know that's not a feeling I should ignore.

I live in Silicon Valley. I watch what's being built here every day. And I'm building something myself, a company called Collected, alongside a cofounder who can take an idea from an engineering call to a working prototype before we hang up. That's not a brag. It's context. Because when I write about what's coming for this market, I'm not writing from the outside looking in. I'm standing inside it, watching two worlds collide, and I think most people in the watch business don't yet understand what's heading their way.

There are people operating in this market right now who will not have a business in five years. Not because they aren't talented. Not because they don't know their watches. Because they never saw it coming. And by the time they do, the leverage they spent twenty years building will already be gone. I say that knowing it might apply to me too.

The democratization of information is shifting power from the few to the many. Collectors are becoming true subject matter experts, not broadly, but deeply. Someone who has spent five years studying a single reference knows things about that watch that most dealers don't. Multiply that across hundreds of collectors, each going deep in their own corner of the market, and the sum of it is a fundamental shift in who holds the knowledge. It used to live with dealers. Increasingly, it lives everywhere. That's just the beginning.

Pretty soon AI models will be more informed than all dealers combined. Not eventually, not theoretically, soon. These systems are being trained on more images, more transaction data, more historical examples than any individual could accumulate in a lifetime. The knowledge that took the best in this business decades to build is becoming something a model will access in seconds. I don't say that to be alarmist. It's simply where all the signs point. The question isn't whether it happens. It's what you do about it before it does.

The vintage watch market has always rewarded a specific kind of expertise. Not just knowing what a correct dial looks like, but knowing when something about it doesn't feel right. Knowing which questions to ask and how to read the answers. A dealer with a trained eye doesn't just see what's in front of them. They see what's missing, what's been changed, what the story doesn't explain. That judgment takes years to develop and it's genuinely hard to fake.

But some of what gets called expertise in this market is something else entirely. It's controlled access to information. Details that lived in a small number of heads because there was no efficient way to distribute them. Buyers who depended on dealers not just for access to watches, but for the basic confidence to transact at all. That's the part that's going away.

AI doesn't replace dealers. It moves the knowledge layer from private to shared. The details that once required years to learn become things a well-trained model surfaces instantly. That doesn't make dealers irrelevant. It makes a certain kind of dealer irrelevant. The one whose edge depended entirely on knowing more than the person across the table.

Here's what I think about most: the dealers most exposed are probably the last ones who will see it coming. Not because they aren't smart, but because the model that's worked for them is still working. The leverage is still there, for now. That makes it almost impossible to feel urgency about something that hasn't hurt you yet.

But the buyers are already changing. Showing up sharper. Asking better questions. Harder to bluff. And once the tools catch up with that trend, the shift won't feel gradual. It'll feel sudden. And for some people in this business, sudden will be too late. What comes next is something this market has never had. A confidence layer built into how watches are bought, sold, and judged. Not just authentication. Confidence scores.

A watch doesn't just get verified as genuine. It gets scored across multiple dimensions. The probability the dial is original, whether components are period correct, signs of restoration, integrity of the case, strength of the provenance. Each signal combines into something that tells a buyer not just what the watch is, but how certain we can be about it.

And it doesn't stop at the object. The dealer gets scored too. Transaction history. Disclosure accuracy. How disputes were handled. How consistently the watches they sell turn out to be exactly what they said they were. Reputation stops being anecdotal and starts being measurable.

The market will have memory.

And that memory will drive the change buyers have always wanted. Transparency. Not as a buzzword but as a structural reality. For the first time, the information that used to disappear the moment a deal closed, what the watch really was, what the dealer really said, whether it all held up, gets to stick around. The market corrects itself. The good actors rise. The ones who depended on opacity don't get to reset with each new buyer. That's not just disruption. That's the market becoming what it should have been all along.

For collectors this is straightforwardly good. The biggest barrier to this market was never price. It was uncertainty. Spending serious money on an object that requires specialist knowledge is intimidating, especially given the horror stories. Tools that reduce that uncertainty open the market to people who were always interested but never felt confident enough to participate. The market grows. Liquidity follows.

For dealers the shift is harder. The role doesn't disappear. It evolves. Sourcing exceptional watches still requires taste, access, and judgment that no model replicates. Knowing when a watch is right for someone, building a relationship over years, being the person someone calls when something important comes up. That's still human work.

But the dealers who thrive will be the ones who lean into transparency. Who document provenance, disclose condition honestly, and build a track record that holds up when it becomes visible. In a market with confidence scores, integrity compounds. The dealers who have always operated that way are about to find the market catches up to them.

The ones who haven't are going to feel it before they understand why.

The watch market is not the first to go through this. Real estate agents who controlled local information lost that advantage when the data became widely available. The ones who survived focused on what data can't replace. Judgment, relationships, guidance. Travel agents who simply booked flights disappeared. The ones who curated experiences became more valuable than ever.

The dealers who succeed in the next decade won't be the ones who guard the most information. They'll be the ones who create the most confidence, around the watches they sell and around themselves.

I've thought a lot about where I fit in that world. What I keep coming back to is this: what I've always sold is trust. Not just knowledge. Trust. The ability to tell someone, with my name attached, that a watch is what it is, that the story adds up, that they're not going to regret the call. I think that's the thing that survives.

But I'm not taking it for granted. I'm building for it. The old market rewarded access. The new one will reward transparency. Those are not the same thing, and those who built for one will have to rebuild for the other.

The window to do that is shrinking. Faster than most people realize.