The World’s Most Expensive Matching Outfit.

Imagine arriving at a party and discovering every guest is wearing the same jacket.

Excellent jacket. Beautiful stitching. Expensive. The salesperson promised it would make you stand out.

It did, right up until the entire neighborhood bought one.

Business technology has a talent for doing this. The spreadsheet was an advantage. Then everybody had spreadsheets. A CRM helped companies remember their customers. Then everybody had a CRM, and remarkably few people remembered to call anybody back.

Now we have AI. Some of it is extraordinary. Some of it is a very expensive way to produce an average sentence at impressive speed. Companies are rushing to use it for research, writing, customer service, forecasting, and things that previously involved a human being staring out a window while trying to think.

That doesn't make AI unimportant. It makes the next question more interesting.

What happens when your competitors can buy the same capability?

Picture two businesses with similar technology, similar prices, and access to the same operating playbook. One is full of people who notice unusual opportunities, argue intelligently, remember their customers, and occasionally make a beautiful decision that can't be explained by a dropdown menu. The other runs a remarkably efficient process for being forgettable.

Both may have excellent dashboards.

Only one gives people a reason to care.

It's tempting to believe that the most sophisticated tool will win. But tools travel. Good judgment is harder to ship in a box. Taste, trust, imagination, and the peculiar chemistry of an excellent team don't arrive automatically with the software license.

Businesses will still need faster tools, including AI. The trick is not mistaking the purchase receipt for a strategy.

Wear the jacket. It's a nice jacket.

Maybe learn to dance.

#BusinessStrategy #ArtificialIntelligence