By Ryan Trimberger, Haresh Vaishnav, and Eric Yuen
An increasing number of technology leaders are experiencing a disorienting scenario: watching a competitor launch an AI capability that looks functionally identical to something your team spent 18 months and millions of dollars building.
Same foundation model. Same use case. Same customer-facing result. The difference? Your competitors built it in a quarter of the time it took your team, using the same cloud platforms and pretrained models that are now available to any organization.
It raises a question that no amount of sunk cost can paper over: If the underlying technology is commoditized and the outputs are converging, where exactly is the value in your AI investment?
This is the new competitive reality. AI capabilities that once required years of specialized investment—customer support automation, financial forecasting, supply chain optimization—are now broadly accessible through cloud platforms and open ecosystems. A 2025 BCG study found that 60% of organizations report minimal revenue and cost gains from AI and lack the capabilities to scale it—even as the top 5% of firms pull further ahead of their competition with 1.7x revenue growth and 3.6x total shareholder returns.
