Navigating the Intense Tech Competitive Landscape: Finding Your AI Product's Unique Advantage

As the competitive landscape of AI continues to evolve at breakneck speed, how can product leaders and teams answer the most pressing question: what do I build and why will it win?

1. The past 45 days in the tech industry have seen numerous product launches and company collapses.
2. Notion launched competitors for Granola, Glean, and Chat GPT; Figma launched competitors for Canva, Framer, Illustrator, and Lovable.
3. Other companies like Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI also introduced similar products in the same timeframe.
4. This level of competition is causing stress and uncertainty in the industry.
5. The key question that businesses must answer is "What do I build and why will it win?"
6. This question has always been important for product managers but has become even more critical due to increased competition.
7. Great product managers are those who can find insights that others have not yet acted upon, providing a competitive advantage.
8. The current competitive landscape is like the Battle of Gettysburg, with fast-moving incumbents and new horizontal platforms eating up major use cases.
9. Foundational shifts in technology and an increasing number of startups further complicate the situation.
10. Amidst this chaos, finding a seam to gain traction and win is crucial.
11. The speaker, Brian, is the founder and CEO of Reforge, which has been around for 10 years and has helped thousands of product teams and professionals.
12. To answer the question of how to win in an intense environment, one must first understand the traps that can hinder success.
13. The two most common traps are reinventing the AI wheel and implementing basic AI features without proper differentiation.
14. Treating AI like a series of Lego blocks, where differentiated features and products are assembled using the best available AI capabilities, is the key to success.
15. Competitive advantage comes from uniquely owned data, functionality, and understanding unmet customer needs, not the AI itself.
16. The anatomy of a winning AI product includes AI capabilities, data, and functionality as its major building blocks.
17. Data provides context to a model, generating unique outputs based on its uniqueness.
18. Functionality in a product determines how the AI behaves, providing a delightful user experience.
19. Granola, an AI notetaker, entered a saturated market and managed to garner 40% of the room's attention and $50 million in funding.
20. Granola differentiated itself by understanding that users wanted help taking better notes rather than replacing their full job.
21. They used off-the-shelf capabilities, such as Deep Gram for videoion and Anthropic for other functionality, but assembled them uniquely to meet user needs.
22. Continuously sequencing new sets of unique building blocks is crucial for staying ahead in the competitive landscape.
23. The real moat for companies today is a sequence of smaller moats stacked together, each buying time and requiring quick execution and evolution to stay ahead.
24. To win with AI, businesses must understand unmet customer problems, identify novel ways to solve them using AI capabilities, leverage proprietary data to power those solutions, and provide superpo

Source: AI Engineer via YouTube

❓ What do you think? What is the most critical question your organization must answer in order to successfully navigate the rapidly changing AI-powered product landscape and achieve long-term competitiveness? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!