For the past few years, access to AI has been an advantage in itself. The companies that moved early could automate faster, build new capabilities, and experiment in ways their competitors could not. But that window is quickly closing.
As powerful AI models become more accessible, affordable, and widely understood, simply having AI is no longer enough to differentiate a business. When every company has access to many of the same tools and capabilities, the advantage shifts to what businesses do with them: how they rethink operations, empower their people, accelerate innovation, and ultimately turn AI into meaningful business outcomes.
When Access to AI Is No Longer a Competitive Advantage
Businesses have always needed to describe to the market what they do, how they do it, and why they are better. It could be a set of features, price, brand, or a combination of all three. The best companies learned how to do this and executed again and again, regardless of how the technology around them changed. At the end of the day, the tech was just a tool to support the core purpose of the product.
With the introduction of AI, early adopters were able to seize a momentary advantage. They brought products to market quickly, disrupted incumbents, and gained a foothold. But as fast as they were able to leverage AI, other companies were able to catch up.
The cost of the tools is dropping, understanding of how they work is growing, and it is easier to get something out of AI. To drive sustainable advantage, you still need to have a great product or service.
The key difference with AI is the speed at which innovation can happen, and thus the pace at which each company will need to move to keep up. That might just require a different kind of leadership, culture, and ability to execute.
Moving Beyond Better and Faster
Early uses of AI models have largely focused on improving existing processes, following the same pattern we have seen with new technologies for years: making work faster, more efficient, and more effective.
But just doing better and faster won’t be enough. What needs to come next is what we can do differently.
Companies need to step back and challenge the fundamental assumptions about how they run their business, many of which were driven by cost, time, and the resources required to operate. With AI, we can consider delivering in ways previously thought to be non-economical or impossible to execute. Capabilities like concierge service and real-time personalization can be made available to all customers, not just a select few.
AI also gives us a new model for human capital and how it gets deployed. The idea of the forward-deployed employee creates leverage by enabling people who previously managed the work to now do more of the work themselves because of AI.
This creates possibilities for speed-to-market, market intelligence, innovation, and value. As AI helps flatten an organization, every role can make a material impact on the business. We do not need hierarchy to manage at a command-and-control level. AI can do that for us and free up our leaders to be creative and innovative.
Designing the Business Around What AI Makes Possible
Moving forward, it is less about adapting AI to the business and more about designing the business to maximize the value that AI brings. Imagine if an organization had unlimited human capital, endless resources, and a deep level of available expertise. Would the business replicate the way it runs today, or would it look completely different?
We need to think about AI as a resource multiplier that allows the business itself to be designed differently.
Imagine an insurance company that could deliver its product without needing thousands of people to provide support. Costs would go down, service could be excellent for all, and customers would want access to its products and services.
There are countless examples of how AI has allowed new businesses to emerge, and we will see more at an accelerated pace in the years to come.
The Bigger Risk Is the Opportunity Companies Are Missing
It is less about big mistakes and more about missed opportunities. AI is not just a better search engine, although it can do that. It is not just for writing a better email, although it can do that too. What is missing is the idea of how to use AI to break the constraints that have hampered growth, accelerate learning, and support employees to be more effective.
Too many companies are questioning whether AI is doing the work or the employee is, or whether something written by AI is plagiarizing. We need to move away from this kind of thinking and instead think about the world of possibility AI creates when we can execute better and faster.
AI is not the enemy. Using it to support what we do is about optimizing how we show up and what we deliver. If a document can be written by AI, in its style, and it serves the purpose, then we should do that every time.
We need to empower employees with the tools to be creative, not control what they are doing. Of course, AI needs to be secure and compliant, but that cannot get in the way of innovation.
Where the Next Competitive Advantage Will Come From
There are three areas where I think the next big thing will come from: augmentation, cycle time, and new business models.
Augmentation
Historically, people and skills have been a limiter for many companies. They have had to build structure and processes to make up for the talent required to execute at the top level.
With AI, we can up-level the entire team and provide resources, best practices, analytics, and so much more in real time so that they can execute better, essentially augmenting the team.
Cycle Time
Companies will be able to use AI to do simulations, modeling, and brainstorming at a near-zero marginal cost and in iterations that are happening at a speed that we have not experienced before.
Decisions that took months compress into weeks. Weeks compress into days. That buys you two things: the ability to respond faster than your competitors, and the ability to move first because you found the answer before they started looking.
New Business Models
AI gives you a live lab. You can test a model, run detailed competitive analysis in real time, and validate or kill an opportunity before committing capital to it.
The cost of trying something drops far enough that the question stops being whether you can afford to test it and becomes whether you can afford not to.
