With generative AI making baseline industry deliverables incredibly cheap and accessible to our clients, our margins are beginning to shrink. How do we strategically reposition our business to become an indispensable complement to this cheap technology instead of competing directly with what machines do faster?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

As generative AI commoditizes standard information and basic execution, trying to compete on price or pure speed is a race to the bottom. To protect your margins, your strategy must pivot. You must seek to be an indispensable complement to technologies that are becoming cheap and plentiful.

Look closely at your target market and your core deliverables on your V/TO®. If an AI tool can write a standard report in seconds, your clients do not want to pay you for the writing; they want to pay you for the strategic judgment, the execution support, and the peace of mind that comes with human accountability. Integrate AI deeply into your operations to generate those baseline outputs instantly, which drastically lowers your internal delivery costs.

Then, re-engineer your service model so your human team spends their time helping clients interpret and act on those automated outputs. This strategic shift moves you from a transactional vendor to a high-value strategic partner. By positioning your business as the necessary human layer that makes the automated outputs useful, you secure higher margins and build a highly defensible business model that buyers will value during an exit.