Your AI Strategy Is Already Too Late

Every CEO I talk to asks the same question: "How do we get ahead with AI?"

You can't. That race is over.

While you've been planning your AI transformation, AI has become cheap, fast, and available to everyone. Your competitive advantage from "having AI" lasts about as long as your competitive advantage from "having email" did in 2005.

The real question is this: “What do you do when your competitors have the same AI tools you do?”

The commoditization happening right now

OpenAI's big lead? It’s shrinking fast. Other companies are building models that work just as well for way less money.

Your proprietary data is less valuable every day. These foundation models have already learned from most of the internet. Your customer database isn't the secret weapon you think it is.

Cloud AI services? Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are competing on price just as they do on storage and cloud CPU, and it’s a race to the bottom.

All that money you're spending on AI infrastructure? You're building small advantages with expiration dates that are coming up soon.

What actually survives the AI flood

Speed beats perfection

While your competitors spend months building the perfect AI strategy, companies that move fast are already on their third version. They find problems, test fixes, and scale what works. By the time you launch your AI initiative, they've learned what doesn't work and moved on.

Relationships beat algorithms

LinkedIn works because of the network, not the technology. Stripe works because developers have already integrated with it. These advantages get stronger over time. AI capabilities don't.

Control the workflow, not the tool

Don't just add AI to your existing process. Build a completely new process that only makes sense with AI. Then own that new way of doing things.

Make your people superhuman

Everyone talks about AI replacing workers.

The smart move, though, is to make your existing team 1x, 2x, or even 10x more capable. AI that amplifies human judgment beats AI that replaces human tasks every single time.

Use proprietary knowledge

Everyone trains AI on what customers say they want. Instead, train it on what they actually do. For example, there's a massive gap between what people claim and what they buy. While your competitors analyze survey responses, build AI using behavioral science and predicts the subconscious psychology behind client behavior.

What to stop wasting money on

• Your data strategy. Stop hoarding data like it's oil. Foundation models have already learned from the entire internet. Your customer database matters less every day. That expensive data lake? It's becoming a puddle.

• Your proprietary models. Unless you're OpenAI or Google, building your own AI is like building your own email server in 2024. It’s an expensive vanity project that delivers zero competitive advantage.

• Your perfect AI implementation plan. While you spend six months planning the ideal rollout, three competitors have already deployed, learned what doesn't work, and moved to version two. Perfect planning is slow planning. Slow planning is dead planning.

Start moving fast instead. Test things. Break things. Learn what works. The advantage goes to whoever figures out what doesn't work faster than everyone else.

Companies still building "AI strategies" in 2025 are like companies building "internet strategies" in 2010. It’s too late. The strategic question has moved.

The competitive battle shifted from "How do we get AI?" to "What do we do when everyone has AI?" Most executives are fighting last year's war while this year's war happens around them.

Your choice is simple. Catch up to where the market was six months ago and compete with everyone else doing the same thing. Or build for where the market is going and leave them behind.

The companies spending 2025 implementing AI will spend 2026 wondering why their expensive AI projects delivered nothing but parity with competitors who moved faster.

This is exactly the kind of strategic shift I help leadership teams navigate. If you're ready to stop chasing AI and start building post-AI advantages, let's talk: ericbrown.com