AI Won’t Kill your company. Imitation Will.
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:
Data Stewardship – Fine‑tune models on proprietary exhaust no one else owns.
Cultural Dissent – Reward contrarian prompts that stress‑test the model’s first draft.
Decision Provenance – Log which model, dataset, and prompt lineage shaped every material call.
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.
