AI Isn’t Your Friendly Assistant—It’s Your Competitor

Over the past few years, we’ve been offered a neatly packaged narrative—Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a helpful assistant designed to make life easier, blending a friendly prompt to support daily tasks and ask questions accessed from our favorite device or embedded into the enterprise software we use every day. It is framed as a tool to help businesses work faster, reduce errors, simplify complexity, handle administrative burdens, interpret data, generate ideas, answer questions, and more.

Those categorizations may be accurate, but metaphorically, the fox, AI, is in the henhouse. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether we left the door open, or if it snuck in on its own. It’s inside, and this isn’t some harmless furry pet sniffing around and visiting the chickens. It’s a predator—silent, swift, and often unnoticed until it’s too late.

OK, a little dramatic to make the point that thinking about AI as a friendly assistant overlooks AI’s developing and changing role as a competitive and disruptive force capable of reshaping or eliminating entire industries designed for efficiency. Not your friendly and trusty companion.

In a recent candid moment, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged—with a touch of humor—that politeness toward AI, like saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT, is not necessary and has already cost the company tens of millions of dollars in extra computing and electricity expenses. [1] While the remarks were lighthearted, the underlying message is that every word typed into a generative AI prompt carries a cost, and those costs scale quickly, and you don’t need to be nice—AI doesn’t care. While humans value nuance and social grace, AI is driven by speed, efficiency, and results, not etiquette. 

AI as a Competitor

If a competitor is anything—or anyone—that aims to outperform you by taking your job, market share, or resources, then AI has already emerged as one of our most relentless rivals. It doesn’t sleep or complain, skips office politics, remembers its training, has no regard for social niceties, ingests vast amounts of data, learns continuously, and improves with every interaction. AI won’t hesitate to replace you or your business and feels no empathy or remorse if it does.

Although far from perfect, AI is already outcompeting humans in many areas, as today it can perform the following:

• Resolve many types of customer support inquiries instantly, in any language

• Write and test code

• Perform complex calculations in milliseconds

• Analyze research papers, legal documents, or financial records in seconds

• Personalize and execute marketing and sales campaigns at scale

• Forecast business trends and identify risks and opportunities with more precision than entire analyst teams

• Assist in medical diagnoses and treatment recommendations

• Find new applications for existing drugs and pharmaceuticals

• Act as an assistant who can answer emails, make appointments, and send reminders

• Observe a computer screen in real time and provide assistance, guidance, or task automation, including real-time help for many enterprise applications

• In some cities, drive a fully automated car or taxi

• Review and make recommendations on how best to optimize business processes

• Identify security risks and fix them

• Write and create papers, reports, charts, video, and pictures

• And so much more…

  List 1 - AI Today

In many of these examples, AI isn’t just a little better. It’s multiple times better—performing core business functions with a level of scale, knowledge, accuracy, and speed that most human teams can’t match—sometimes, even replicating or creating human personas to deliver services via chat, voice, or video. Not only does that shift the balance of productivity, but it also rewires the competitive landscape, altering cost structures and the value of many job functions and businesses. 

To highlight how fast this transformation is happening, in its recent report, “The State of AI: How Organizations Are Rewiring to Capture Value,” McKinsey & Company reported that 78% of organizations now use AI in at least one business function—up from 55% in 2023. The study also shows a significant rise in organizations integrating AI across multiple business functions. Notably, 63% of survey respondents indicated they already use generative AI tools. Many of these organizations also see a positive impact on revenues and cost reduction. The same report, however, also noted that enterprise-level Earnings Before Interest and Taxes (EBIT) profits have not followed at the same level, highlighting the importance of making good decisions about what AI initiatives to take on. [2]

Where to Begin—The New Competitive Reality

To unlock new perspectives about today’s AI competitive reality, ask some simple questions— the uncomfortable and direct kind that people and businesses tend to avoid.

“If an AI-native competitor entered your market today—built with a clean slate and not dependent on legacy systems, human overhead, or resistance to automation, operating at lower cost—how would it compete with you?

Would it deliver faster?  Would it make your current staff, pricing, sales, delivery, service, or support model and value proposition obsolete in whole or in part? 

What would your customers think and do?”

Asking and answering these questions is more than a thought experiment. It’s a strategic kick-start. Designed to stress the need to broaden strategic planning beyond simple KPI’s, traditional financial and business metrics, and incremental feature improvements.

AI, much like previous waves of transformative technology, is quietly but profoundly disrupting growth prospects for many high-performing companies. Nowhere is this more apparent than looking at the constant shuffle of the Rule of 40 leaderboard—a benchmark that combines revenue growth and profit margin to assess the health of SaaS and other high-growth firms. Traditionally, a Rule of 40 score above 40% signals a healthy, balanced, sustainable business model. But as AI-native competitors emerge and major legacy players embed advanced AI into their offerings, many fast-growing companies find their once-strong Rule of 40 scores slipping—or collapsing altogether. AI-powered newcomers often scale with minimal headcount, low capital investment, organizational drag, and agile operating models that bypass the traditional revenue and margin growth constraints.

According to a recent AlixPartners analysis of 122 publicly traded enterprise software firms with under $10 billion in revenue, midsize SaaS companies are under growing pressure as AI reshapes the software landscape. The share of high-growth companies has fallen from 57% in 2023 to 39% in 2024, with only 27% projected to meet that benchmark this year. Meanwhile, net dollar retention dropped from 120% in 2021 to 108%, signaling weakening customer loyalty. These firms are being squeezed by nimble, AI-native challengers and large incumbents bundling AI into broader platforms. AlixPartners suggests that survival depends on structural change, not just product, service, and feature updates, but full-scale transformation.[3,3a]

In this new reality, regularly and honestly assessing how vulnerable you, your industry, company, or offerings are to AI-driven competition is no longer optional—it’s essential. 

The most disruptive threats, in most cases during these transformation epochs, don’t come from traditional competitors, but from businesses designed from day one to optimize speed, intelligence, and scale. These businesses are not trying to retrofit AI into outdated structures and organizations—they are building entirely new business models around AI capabilities. If you’re running an established business, you can’t afford to be complacent, because disruption doesn’t discriminate. Every business, large or small, is vulnerable.

Large, well-established industry leaders often fall into the trap of trying to preserve their past success rather than challenging it. Encouraged by a false sense of security based on current performance, they may cautiously layer AI into existing processes, products, and services without questioning whether the entire model needs reinvention. Self-serving fear of disrupting their job, customer relationships, internal dynamics, or revenue streams prevents or limits bold innovation. By deferring transformation to some distant future, any brand, capital, or market lead is squandered, ultimately losing the edge and advantage that sets them apart.

Think small businesses and trades are safe from AI disruption? Think again. AI-powered agents are starting to transform trade businesses—electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians—by managing back-office operations like appointment scheduling, customer inquiries, route and staffing optimization, and even pre-diagnosing issues to ensure the correct parts are on hand. This reduces costly repeat visits, accelerates repair times, improves cash flow, and enhances customer satisfaction. These agents also execute outbound marketing and offer multilingual support. This is here, and traditional trade businesses not leveraging AI today are already starting to fall behind—operating slower, less efficiently, and at higher costs. At the same time, AI-enabled competitors deliver a faster, more innovative, and profitable “last-mile” customer experience. 

A recent Wall Street Journal article, titled “AI Is Here for Plumbers and Electricians. Will It Transform Home Services?”, explores how AI is making inroads into the home-services industry through platforms like San Francisco-based Netic, which secured $20 million in funding to help plumbers, electricians, and HVAC professionals automate tasks such as customer communication, appointment scheduling, and predictive maintenance. [4]

Here’s the reality—the future will happen with or without your permission. Don’t believe it? Drive through old office parks, shopping malls, and manufacturing hubs packed with people and cars in the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s. Look at the empty parking lots now overgrown with weeds of businesses that have come and gone— not all those empty spaces belong to people working from home. The pandemic has been over for some time.

The point is that organizations of all sizes may be engineering obsolescence by protecting the status quo. Choosing not to disrupt your current business model doesn’t mean your market won’t be disrupted. It just means you won’t be the one leading the change. This also means there is an opportunity for start-ups and mid-sized firms to enter and disrupt just about any market, and large established firms to extend their lead.

The companies that succeed will be the ones that are bold enough to build or redesign their business around what AI makes possible—and if you don’t, someone else will.

From Awareness to Strategic Integration

Today's conversation should be moving beyond “Should we use AI?”—that question has been answered. It should advance to a new level of critical thinking by asking, “How do we stay competitive and thrive in a world where AI informs strategy, drives execution, and redefines value?”

That means rethinking workflows and reimagining customer experiences. Elevating the work your people do by eliminating the routine and enabling them to focus on the complex, human parts of the business—by making them even more human, anticipating change, and designing your organization to adapt better to a fast-changing landscape. This applies to global leaders and millions of small businesses.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking AI is just a fad and it won’t impact you, or that you can wait to see what happens.

Start thinking about how to strategize and plan for the AI-driven future by asking the following questions:

If an AI-native startup entered my market tomorrow, what would they provide or do differently?

Which parts of the value chain are ripe for reinvention—think beyond repetition?

Is anything or everything we do based on outputs driven by rules, standards, and inputs that AI could easily disrupt?

How is the competition using AI?

Do we even understand what is possible with AI, and how do we stay current?

Exercise to Jumpstart the Process

This exercise can be used individually or as a group to start a dynamic AI brainstorming session.

Begin by asking everyone to choose a well-known or established business or industry from the past 50 years and spend a few minutes writing down how and why that business might have taken a different path if today’s AI capabilities had been available. Encourage bold thinking and imaginative scenarios.

After the allotted time, come together and share your ideas.

Next, review and briefly discuss the earlier list of what AI can do from this article (Figure 1 – AI Today) and add other emerging recent advancements that the participants know about.

Finally, complete a quick search of “AI Business Advancements” in the news section of a major search engine—review a few of the results. The facilitator can do this step before moving the exercise along. Keep the tone interactive throughout the exercise—reinforce that this is not theoretical. AI is here, real, and it’s already reshaping the world around us.

Now have the team repeat the exercise using this expanded understanding of AI’s capabilities. Again, share the results with the group.

Figure 1. Seeing The Possibilities of AI

If a spark is needed to get started, consider offering one or two thought-provoking examples to jumpstart the brainstorming.  Here are a few ideas others shared during sessions where I’ve led this exercise.*

Y2K Remediation Industry

In the late 1990s, companies spent billions hiring consultants to manually identify and fix legacy code bugs related to the year 2000.

What Would Have Changed: AI could have scanned, corrected, and tested codebases at scale, eliminating the need for millions of manual hours and entire consulting practices.

Current Disruptors: GitHub Copilot, DeepCode (Snyk), and LLM-based legacy code analyzers, Claude 3 Opus, Microsoft Copilot for Azure.

Call Centers and Customer Service Providers

In the 1980’s and 1990’s after phone deregulation offshore call centers scaled to handle basic, repetitive support tasks—account updates, password resets, scheduling—relying on large human teams.

What Would Have Changed: AI chatbots and voice assistants could have handled most Tier 1 and Tier 2 support autonomously, reducing or eliminating the need for large-scale call centers.

Current Disruptors: GPT-4, Amazon Lex, Google Dialogflow, AI voice agents, Salesforce Einstein Service Copilot, Cognigy, Forethought Solve.

Medical Illustration Industry

From the time of widespread print distribution, professional illustrators created detailed anatomical drawings and medical visuals for education, research, and training—manually or with software tools.

What Would Have Changed: AI can now generate high-quality, anatomically accurate illustrations or 3D models in seconds, customized to demographics, conditions, or use cases.

Current Disruptors: DALL·E, BioGPT, MONAI, BIODIGITAL, and domain-specific medical visualization tools.

Government Services and Disaster Planning

National and local disaster response has relied on fragmented planning, slow coordination, and manual resource allocation, often leading to delays in critical moments.

What Would Have Changed: AI could have predicted impact zones, optimized evacuation routes, and streamlined resource allocation—saving lives and money in disasters like Hurricane Katrina or California wildfires.

Current Disruptors: DeepMind (geospatial modeling), Palantir AIP, real-time AI decision platforms, Massive Multilingual Speech (MMS).

Marketing Agencies

As we moved into the consumer-based post-war society, agencies employed teams of copywriters, designers, media planners, and buyers to execute product and service campaigns.

What Would Have Changed: AI now generates personalized content, runs real-time A/B tests, automates posting, and optimizes media spend—reducing the need for large creative and buying teams.

Current Disruptors: Jasper, Persado, Canva AI, Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max.

Search Engine Companies and the SEO Industry

Search engine companies built business models around keyword rankings and paid links, giving rise to an entire SEO and SEM ecosystem.

What Would Have Changed: AI prioritizes direct answers over ranked links, shifting users away from search engines to conversational interfaces.

Current Disruptors: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s SGE (Search Generative Experience), Copy.ai.

Academic Research and Literature Review

From the early days of higher education, researchers manually reviewed databases, citations, and journals to build literature reviews and find relevant academic work.

What Would Have Changed: AI can instantly scan and summarize thousands of papers, extract key findings, and even suggest new research angles.

Current Disruptors: Elicit, Semantic Scholar with AI, and GPT-based research summarization tools.

Finance and Wall Street Analysts

For decades, financial analysts spent countless hours gathering market data, modeling projections, writing reports, and generating investor insights—often relying on manual spreadsheets and proprietary research tools.  The rise of computers over the past 4 decades has made this role even more critical to stay competitive.

What Would Have Changed: AI can ingest massive amounts of financial data, perform real-time analysis, generate earnings summaries, identify anomalies, and even write investment memos—faster and often with fewer errors than a team of human analysts.

Current Disruptors: BloombergGPT, Kensho, AlphaSense, ChatGPT-powered research assistants, and autonomous trading algorithms.

*Please note: The Current Disruptors is not a comprehensive list but a sample of potential tools mentioned in brainstorming sessions.

This exercise often initially proves more difficult than expected—many participants are only starting to grasp and scratch the surface of the potential of today’s AI. After learning from others about AI and reviewing AI’s current capabilities, the exercise often receives a boost, and the ideas typically increase and flow—that’s precisely the point!

The objective of this exercise isn’t just to inspire creative thinking around AI. It is to reveal the widespread awareness gap around AI’s ability to transform strategy, disrupt industries—almost any industry, and redefine value. It also highlights how vulnerable many markets are to rapid change—and how much untapped opportunity remains for those with the awareness and vision to think beyond the present.

So How To Win: Compete With It, Then Make It Compete for You

To survive and compete and thrive in an AI-driven world, organizations must do more than adopt new tools—they must show up with and embrace a new strategic mindset.

Figure 2. Embracing AI as a Strategic Competitor

Organizations of all shapes and sizes should:

1. Resist the temptation to be overconfident in their position today, as an employee or business

AI levels playing fields and erodes traditional advantages quickly. Past success can create dangerous blind spots. Staying competitive means constantly reassessing your value proposition, capabilities, and vulnerabilities—regardless of current market position.

2. Adopt a broader perspective and remain open to new ideas, technologies, and ways of working—look and learn not just from your industry but others as well

Innovation rarely comes from within silos. It takes courage to challenge entrenched assumptions and be brave enough to look at the world differently. The organizations that scan the horizon across sectors and geographies and are willing to test, learn, borrow, and blend ideas from unexpected places will lead. They will be the ones who outpace disruption rather than fall victim to it.

3. Reskill people to thrive in high-value, human-centered roles

As AI takes on more routine, analytical, and operational tasks, the competitive advantage shifts to human capabilities like critical thinking, empathy, creativity, judgment, and leadership. AI is not replacing the importance of these human qualities— if anything, it's amplifying their need and importance. Organizations must invest in developing these strengths across their workforce to remain relevant and resilient. 

4. Build organizational flexibility to adapt to change and seize emerging opportunities rapidly

Rigid hierarchies and slow-moving processes are liabilities in an AI-accelerated world. Companies must design for agility—structuring teams, systems, process, and strategies to pivot quickly as technology, customer needs, and competitors evolve.

Stop thinking AI is your friend. It’s time to treat AI as a partner, dynamic competitive force, and agent of change already shaping markets, shifting power, and rewriting playbooks.

When we do this, we stop asking, "How can AI help us do what we already do?" and ask the bigger and more forward-looking strategic question, "What becomes possible when we let AI challenge the value of what we do?"

That's where the real competitive edge lies. Not in resisting the change. But in recognizing it.

Not fearing competition from AI. But rethinking how we compete.

AI isn't just a future disruptor. It's a present-day rival.

If we lead with vision and intention and widen our view, AI can become one of our greatest partners and motivators. The question isn’t whether AI will change your business—it’s whether you’ll lead that change, provide your customers with a leap in value, or watch someone else do it.  

Choose to lead! Sometimes, a little competition is just the motivation you need.

References and Citations

1. Carroll, S. (2025, April 21). Saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT costs OpenAI millions, Sam Altman says. Quartz. Retreived May 5, 2025, from https://qz.com/open-ai-sam-altman-chatgpt-gpt4-please-thank-you-1851777047

2. McKinsey & Company. The State of AI: Generative AI’s Breakout Year. 12 Mar. 2025. Based on the 2025 McKinsey Global Survey on AI. McKinsey & Company, https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai. Retrieved May 11, 2025

3. Barr, A. (2025, April 21). More than 100 public software companies are getting ‘squeezed’ by AI, a new study finds. Business Insider. Retrieved May 21, 2025, from https://www.businessinsider.com/software-companies-squeezed-by-ai-alixpartners-2025-4

   1. Barr, A. (2025, April 21). More than 100 public software companies are getting ‘squeezed’ by AI, a new study finds. Business Insider. Retrieved May 21, 2025, from Apple News, https://apple.news/AkHmDS2MkTfmbumZdd8185g

4. Lin, B. (2025, June 2). AI is here for plumbers and electricians. Will it transform home services? The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 3, 2025, from https://www.wsj.com/articles/ai-is-here-for-plumbers-and-electricians-will-it-transform-home-services-f383d30a?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Images and MediaCover image, Microsoft Stock Image Photos, May 11, 2025

AI Tools

An actual human – Greg Valyou, wrote this article.  In addition to calling on my experiences, knowledge, and research, AI tools were utilized to augment that process.

1. Napkin. https://www.napkin.ai. Accessed May 18, 2024

   1. Illustration creation, Figure 1. Seeing The Possibilities of AI

   2. Illustration creation, Figure 2. Embracing AI as a Strategic Competitor

2. Grammarly. https://www.grammarly.com. Accessed June 1-7, 2025

   1. Spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and plagiarism checks

3. ChatGPT (4o). https://chatgpt.com. Paid Account, Apple Store Application for Mac. Accessed May 1-June 7, 2025

   1. During draft creation, reviewed suggested options for how to adjust some paragraphs for clarity