When competitors use AI to compress turnaround times from weeks to hours and capture early market share, how should our leadership team reassess our Target Market on the V/TO® without making knee-jerk pivots to our strategy?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

Speed alone does not automatically create long-term strategic advantage if the underlying work is low-margin and easily duplicated. When aggressive competitors use automated pipelines to compress turnaround times, business owners often panic and assume their entire business model is broken. The immediate temptation is to chase their feature set or discount prices to hold onto low-value accounts.

Instead of reacting impulsively in your weekly Level 10 Meeting, take the issue to your next quarterly planning session and look directly at your Target Market on the V/TO. Ask whether the customers defecting to automated providers are actually your ideal right fit clients. Customers who purchase purely on raw turnaround time and commodity pricing are rarely the clients who drive sustainable profitability. They are transactional buyers.

Use AI scenario simulation to model the economic outcome of ceding the bottom twenty percent of your transactional volume to those fast-moving rivals. Run simulations comparing the margin impact of pursuing lower-volume, high-complexity engagements where human strategic oversight is mandatory.

If speed is becoming baseline table stakes across the industry, integrate AI into your Core Processes to eliminate your own internal bottlenecks and free employees from low-value tasks. But keep your positioning focused on outcomes rather than velocity. Economists like Andrew McAfee point out that technology frequently commoditizes execution while raising the value of coordination and judgment. Keep your leadership team focused on client retention in high-stakes environments where an instant, unvetted AI deliverable poses unacceptable business risk to the buyer.