Adrian Maharaj Adrian Maharaj

The First Casualty of AI? Competitive Advantage

Written by Adrian Maharaj

(Views mine, not Google’s.)

A fact‑based point of view on how synthetic sameness devours moats—and how to fight back

I’ve watched every inflection point for two decades, but AI is the first to go mainstream in public and in real time. The tools are universal; the moats are melting. The first casualty? Competitive advantage.

When Everyone Has the Same Superpower, It’s No Longer a Superpower

Most deployments still use:

  • The same foundation models

  • The same open‑web training data

  • The same prompt recipes (“Act as a …”)

The outcome is synthetic sameness—pricing, road‑maps, even marketing copy collapsing into a single median.

Two Public Flashpoints That Triggered This Blog

  1. Dynamic‑Pricing Goes Mainstream
    Delta Air Lines disclosed plans to expand AI‑driven ticket pricing from 3 % to 20 % of domestic flights, spurring congressional scrutiny over “surveillance pricing.” (The Washington Post)

  2. Algorithmic Collusion Allegations
    The U.S. Department of Justice and eight states are suing RealPage, Inc., alleging its rent‑pricing algorithm let thousands of landlords share data and fix rates—a textbook example of AI erasing competitive variance. (Politico)

Neither incident is a bug in the model; each is a failure to ask:
“What if this makes us indistinguishable—or illegally identical?”

Preserving Advantage in an AI‑Flattened Market

Proprietary Exhaust – Fine‑tune models on support tickets, tribal docs, sensor telemetry—data competitors can’t access.

Prompt Dissent – Incentivize teams to break first drafts, not praise them.

Provenance Logs – Trace every AI‑influenced decision back to its model, dataset, and prompt.

Model Diversity – Pair frontier LLMs with smaller, domain‑specific, or on‑prem models to avoid monoculture.

Guardrail Councils – Cross‑functional reviewers with veto power over features carrying “sameness risk.”

The Strategic Reframe

If AI is now electricity, leadership is the fuse box. In Unbuyable Distribution I wrote: “The strongest moat isn’t your tech stack; it’s your point of view, made operational.” Apply that lens to every AI initiative—or watch advantage evaporate.

Save this if you’re architecting variance. Forward it to the board before the next AI budget call.

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Jen Maher Jen Maher

AI Won’t Kill your company. Imitation Will.

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written by Adrian Maharaj

(Views mine, not Google’s.)

Downloadable PDF

I’ve lived through every modern inflection—cloud, mobile, API platforms—inside Google, Meta, Pinterest, Intuit, and more chaos factory rooms I care to remember.. Each wave arrives with the same three‑act play:

(1) Hype Cycle. “This changes everything.”

(2) Tool Rush. Budgets fly at vendors faster than at customers.

(3) Plateau. The advantage evaporates because everyone bought the same thing.

AI is following the script—but the plateau is arriving in months, not years.

The reason is brutally simple: the core technology is instantly available to anyone with a credit card and a Slack channel. GPT‑4o, Claude, Gemini—great equalizers. The differentiator is no longer who has AI; it’s who leads in an AI‑saturated market.

The Silent Cliff: Synthetic Consensus

For those I speak to on the outside, most Exec's celebrate when AI makes teams “more consistent.” Consistency feels safe—until every competitor’s model trains on the same open‑web corpus and recommends the same “optimal” moves:

  • Dynamic‑pricing engines hover at identical margin bands.

  • Copilots surface the same ICP segments.

  • Product roadmaps converge on indistinguishable “AI co‑pilot” features.

When every company optimises for the same answer set, differentiation melts. AI doesn’t replace humans; it replaces competitive variance.

Leadership, Not Tool‑Fluency

A CFO asks, “How much will AI save us?”

The real question is, “How will AI make us undeniably different?

That’s a leadership mandate:

  1. Data Stewardship – Fine‑tune models on proprietary exhaust no one else owns.

  2. Cultural Dissent – Reward contrarian prompts that stress‑test the model’s first draft.

  3. Decision Provenance – Log which model, dataset, and prompt lineage shaped every material call.

  4. Ethical Guardrails – Pre‑empt “tacit collusion” optics when identical AI pricing ripples across industries.

If those bullets feel more like board‑agenda items than engineering tasks, you’re beginning to see the point.

Let’s Play this out

An enterprise SaaS provider let a large‑language model auto‑generate renewal quotes. Competitors using the same vendor soon offered identical percentage discounts in the same window. Customers smelled price‑fixing; legal smelled subpoenas. Three quarters later the firm was still undoing the reputational damage.

Technology failure? Zero.

Leadership failure? 100 %.

Share this with the exec forwarding AI vendor decks. Save it if you plan to lead, not copy.

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Jen Maher Jen Maher

Forget Alignment - Chase Clarity

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Written by Adrian Maharaj

(Views mine, Not Google’s.)

Why premature consensus is a false comfort, and why bold perspective—offered early—is how we actually move

Alignment has become a false god.

In modern organizations, we treat it like the gold standard of progress:

✔ Everyone on the same page.

✔ Everyone agrees.

✔ No tension, no dissent.

Sounds efficient. But it’s a trap.

Because alignment isn’t progress—especially when it’s forced too early.

In fact, it’s often what slows us down the most.

Clarity ≠ Consensus

Alignment tells you people agree.

Clarity tells you what they actually think.

And until we create space for honest disagreement—without performative politeness—we won’t build anything that lasts.

Most teams chase consensus because it feels safe.

But it’s clarity that moves the work forward.

And clarity is earned—not through silence, but through friction.

If you’re not willing to say the uncomfortable thing, you’re not building—you’re complying.

In Product Partnerships, This Isn’t Optional

We operate at the collision points:

  • Product vs. partner demand

  • Engineering vs. commercial ambition

  • Roadmap vs. reality

We aren’t here to fit in. We’re here to bridge the gaps.

That means asking harder questions. Surfacing the unspoken tradeoffs. Challenging defaults—even when it’s inconvenient.

If we wait for alignment from every stakeholder before we move, we’ll never ship anything meaningful.

By the time everyone nods, the moment’s gone.

Perspective Over Permission

This is the shift.

You don’t need permission to think. You need the courage to speak—especially when it’s early, especially when it’s risky.

We don’t need more people waiting to be looped in.

We need more people brave enough to offer a point of view before they’re sure it’s right.

Even if it’s half-baked.

Even if it contradicts the room.

Even if it starts with, “This might be wrong, but…”

Because it’s in those moments that assumptions get exposed.

Clarity gets built.

And momentum becomes possible.

You Will  Be Wrong

That’s the uncomfortable truth.

You’ll push an idea that doesn’t land.

You’ll advocate for something that fails.

You’ll ask for what isn’t feasible.

But if you’re unwilling to be wrong, you’ll never be original.

You’ll orbit safe opinions and pre-approved thinking.

And the work will suffer for it.

We need to normalize being wrong. Normalize the tension. Normalize the pivot.

That’s what actual growth looks like.

It’s not clean. It’s not linear.

It’s hard conversations, partial wins, rewrites, and re-decisions.

That’s how strong systems—and strong people—are built.

What This Looks Like in Practice

So here’s the real shift I’m asking of us:

Stop asking: “Are we aligned?”

Start asking:

 – “What are we assuming?”

 – “What’s missing?”

 – “Where do we disagree?”

Don’t delay your thinking until it’s bulletproof.

Share it while it’s raw—that’s when it’s most useful.

Don’t aim to be right.

Aim to be clear, and aim to learn fast when you’re not.

For your sake and everyone else’s - stop pretending to be offended.

Clarity over consensus.

Perspective over permission.

Movement over agreement.

That’s how we build faster.

That’s how we build smarter.

And that’s how we build trust—not through silence, but through bold, respectful tension.

This isn’t a call for chaos.

It’s a call for conviction.

The kind that makes people pause.

The kind that creates motion.

The kind that makes the room sharper.

We don’t need more agreement.

We need more honesty.

So bring your voice.

Say the thing.

Be early. Be loud.

And let’s move.

— Adrian

(Views expressed here are my own.)

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