If your competitors have the same AI, what gives you an advantage?

An AI system can draft a plausible growth strategy for your category in minutes. That can be a useful starting point. It can surface possibilities, connect information and help a team explore more than it otherwise could.

Your competitors can use similar tools, so what gives your business a different basis for choosing what to do next? When competitors have the same AI, the advantage comes from what each business brings to it: the evidence it has, how it frames the opportunity, the alternatives it seriously considers and the capabilities it can use to act.

AI can strengthen each of these. A strategy becomes generic when those differences are missing or ignored.

Shared tools, different choices

Shared tools raise the standard of the work for everyone. A team can look across more of the market and test an argument from more sides before committing to it.

None of that decides which option suits this business. And shared tools needn’t lead to shared answers. In an online experiment by Doshi and Hauser, writers who could draw on story ideas from a large language model wrote stories rated more creative, better written and more enjoyable. Those stories were also more similar to each other.

The authors put the tension plainly: “With generative AI, writers are individually better off, but collectively a narrower scope of novel content is produced.”

A different experiment, with more than 800 participants, asked people to brainstorm after seeing earlier ideas, some of them from ChatGPT. High exposure to the AI ideas left the creativity of individual ideas unchanged and increased the diversity of ideas across the group.

The tasks differ, and neither concerns business strategy. Read together, they make it hard to argue that a shared tool must lead everyone to the same place. What a team asks of it, and what the team brings to it, shapes what comes back.

A strategy has to know this situation

Imagine two food businesses that see the same publicly discussed demand for convenient, higher-protein products. AI could give each a sound summary of the trend and sensible products to consider.

What separates them is particular to each. One might find a worthwhile opportunity in a specific household routine, such as a weekday breakfast eaten on the move. The other might serve different customers, have a brand trusted for something else, or reach the market through a route that suits another format. Their recommendations differ because their evidence and capabilities do.

Which parts of the brief are fixed?

Many briefs arrive with the problem already defined, often for good reason. Consider a hypothetical brief for a premium extension of a familiar product.

That definition may reflect a real constraint, such as the margin the business needs or the lines it already runs. It may also include an inherited assumption about the occasion, the customer or why people choose the brand.

Telling the two apart keeps what the business has settled and reopens what it hasn’t. AI can help by arguing with the framing, proposing other occasions, customers and reasons to choose for the team to check against what it knows.

Alternatives that differ in substance

A set of options can look broad and still offer one choice. Products with different names, packs and claims may all create value in the same way.

A meaningful alternative changes something more basic: who it serves, the need it meets or how the business would make money from it. AI can make options more alike, and it can do the opposite, developing an unfamiliar direction far enough to be judged fairly and making the strongest case against the team’s favorite.

If every option is a new presentation of what the category already does, a competitor with similar tools may well be choosing among the same ones.

A choice the business can explain

A distinctive strategy is one a business can explain in its own terms: what it chooses, what it sets aside, the evidence behind it and what would change its mind.

Two competitors can read the same trend and choose differently, because they give up different things. AI can test that account too, by looking for evidence against the choice or asking how a competitor with different strengths might respond. The decision, and the responsibility for it, rests with the people who will act on it.

A strategy is generic when it could belong to any business in the category. When the evidence, framing, alternatives and capabilities behind it are your own, a competitor with the same tools is facing a different choice.