Accelerating on AI is the right move. Most organizations are doing it, and they’re right to.
But it’s a symmetric response to an asymmetric threat. An AI-native competitor plays on your ground with fewer constraints, less legacy, and no installed base to protect. Competing on the same dimensions — speed, features, cost — means accepting their rules of the game. And that’s a game they’re built to win.
The real threat isn’t replication
An AI-native competitor probably won’t copy your product feature by feature. They’ll do something more dangerous: they’ll create a simpler, more direct offering in a space you’re not occupying yet — without the weight of your existing architecture, your accumulated technical decisions, your organizational complexity.
The question isn’t “how do we match their velocity?” It’s: what space exists that they can’t reach, even with all the speed in the world?
That’s a different question. And most organizations haven’t asked it.
What defines that space: culture, mindset, assets
It’s not in the code. It’s in what your organization has built over time.
A way of understanding a sector from the inside — not from a pitch deck, but from years of navigating its constraints, its language, its unspoken rules. Relationships of trust that aren’t for sale. A mindset that sees problems others don’t see yet because you’ve lived through earlier versions of them.
An AI-native startup can move fast. It can build in weeks what used to take months. What it cannot do is buy ten years of domain credibility, inherit the tacit knowledge embedded in your teams, or shortcut the trust your clients have placed in you over time. Those aren’t features. They’re the result of a history that can’t be replicated at speed.
The positioning work that urgency tends to skip
This is where April Dunford’s insight becomes strategically critical — not as a marketing exercise, but as a survival question.
Most organizations don’t actually know, with precision, why their customers choose them. They have an intuition. They have a story they tell. But when you press them — what is it, specifically, that we do that no one entering this space fresh could do as well? — the answer gets blurry.
That work — identifying what you genuinely stand for that no fast-moving entrant can replicate — is exactly what the urgency of AI acceleration tends to push aside. There’s always something more immediate to ship. But without that clarity, acceleration has no direction. You move fast, but you move fast toward an open field that an AI-native can enter just as easily.
Speed is necessary. Clarity is what makes it count.
The organizations that will come out of this transition well won’t necessarily be the ones that adopted AI agents first. They’ll be the ones that knew what they were before AI arrived — and used AI to make that sharper, harder to challenge, more valuable to the people who already chose them.
Accelerate, yes. But first, or at least in parallel: do the hard work of understanding what space only you can occupy. Not because you want to defend it. Because that’s where your AI strategy should be pointing.
This is the question I find most underasked in the conversations I have with tech and business leaders right now. If you’re working through it, I’d be glad to think about it together. Find me on LinkedIn.