AI adoption alone won't set you apart. Four real advantages: being first to each new generation, embedding AI into what you already do better than competitors, building hard-to-copy capabilities, or creating entirely new business models. Reinforcing existing strengths is the most practical path.
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I think the most important understanding here is, or at least our perspective is, that is totally not the case, or almost exactly the opposite. AI and Genai is very much a general purpose technology where everyone has access to all companies, but even individuals currently have access to the latest models. So just using that technology will not give you any competitive advantage and it's very much stable stakes to be driving that. So what are angles to think about how to build a real competitive advantage with AI? Here are a couple of them. So you can have the strategy of always being the first in your industry to adopt the latest evolution in gen AI and have a temporal competitive advantage each time you adopt that. That's very much possible. But obviously once you miss one step in the evolution, you don't have your competitive advantage anymore. What I think is the most interesting strategy to pursue is deploying AI to reinforce existing advantages. And that's for example, very much the strategy that Apple is deploying. They're actually not talking about AI all that much, but they're very much still being focused on their existing advantages, having superior products, et cetera, and embedding AI into them to reinforce those rather than to build on something separately and new. The most interesting one, but potentially also the most resembling a holy grail, is to build something that others can't imitate. While that is super interesting to pursue, I don't think that will be in the cards for many companies. And then the four strategy archetype to follow is can we use the technology to develop entirely new business models that could give us a competitive advantage?
