AI Won’t Give You a New Sustainable Advantage

Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) has the potential to radically alter how business is conducted, and there’s no doubt that it will create a lot of value. Companies have used it to identify entirely new product opportunities and business models; to automate routine decisions, freeing humans to focus on decisions that involve ethical trade-offs, empathy, or imagination; to deliver customized professional services formerly available only to the wealthy; and to develop and communicate product and other recommendations to customers faster, more cheaply, and more informatively than was possible with human-driven processes. But, the authors ask, will companies be able to leverage gen AI to build a competitive advantage? The answer, they argue in this article, is no—unless you already have a competitive advantage that rivals cannot replicate using AI. Then the technology may serve to amplify the value you derive from that advantage.