Our marketing team wants to pitch our new AI capabilities as our primary differentiator, but we suspect these features will become standard industry offerings within a year. How do we keep our marketing strategy grounded on our V/TO® without selling tools that will quickly become table stakes?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Do not make the mistake of positioning software tools as your 3 Uniques on your V/TO®. If any competitor can license the same AI tool tomorrow, it is not a differentiator; it is table stakes. As economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee point out, the real value of AI is not the technology itself but how companies reorganize to exploit it. Your clients do not care about your tech stack. They care about outcomes, predictability, and trust. To resolve this on your V/TO®, look past the raw technology and focus on your proprietary methodology. Your AI tools are just the engine. The fuel is your unique dataset, and the driver is your team's industry expertise. Shift your marketing focus to the proprietary way you guide, filter, and validate AI outputs to deliver superior results. Use your next quarterly planning session to identify the proprietary data or process insights that your competitors cannot easily buy. Keep your 3 Uniques focused on your human-led oversight and strategic depth. When you speak to prospective buyers, they will not pay a premium for software subscriptions they can buy themselves. They will pay for the institutional processes and proprietary data sets that make your business highly defensible.