The Firm, Rewired: Part three
Competitive Advantage
If the intelligence is rented, do we still own our company?
The models are a commodity anyone can buy. The compounding advantage is a learning loop built on the context only your business has.
The Learning Loop Is the Moat
Whatever AI you can buy, your competitors can buy too. The leading models are now nearly interchangeable (independent rankings put the gap between the best and the tenth-best at just 5%, down from 12% a year earlier), and the price of any given level of intelligence keeps collapsing. The AI itself is a commodity.
So where is the advantage? In what happens after you deploy. An agent that handles a customer query is a tool. An agent whose every interaction is checked, scored and used to improve the next one is a compounding asset. Your competitors can buy the tool tomorrow. The asset takes months of your own operational signal to build, and there is no shortcut.
Reinvention of Markets
Agents will not just run your existing processes more cheaply. Economists at MIT and Harvard argue they make entirely new ways of doing business practical.
Think about how deals get done today: shortlists, samples, one negotiation at a time, because human attention is expensive and slow. Agents have no such constraint. They can weigh thousands of options at once and find the match that works best for every party. Economists proved these matching methods decades ago; they were simply unworkable at human speed. Once agents are the participants, they become deployable.
Real estate, Hiring, Investing
Analyze vast data & docs with zero fatigue, quick paths into due diligence
Dating, Freelance, Rentals
Evaluate thousands of matches instantly, explore everything, not just samples
Funding, Admissions, Procurement
Compare every metric across options, no time limits, no missed insights
Insurance, Legal, Used cars
Cross-check live data, flag inconsistencies, uncover what humans miss
Home buying, Weddings, Estate planning
Leverage millions of past cases, every user gains expert-level insight
Agentic Commerce
Your next customer may be a piece of software. Google's purchasing standards, alongside payment frameworks from Visa and Mastercard, now let an agent buy on a customer's behalf, either with approval at the checkout, or autonomously within limits the customer sets.
Amazon ("Buy for me"), Walmart, Shopify, Instacart and Alibaba are already deploying agent shopping. Brands that spent two decades optimising for human clicks must now also win over machines.
That changes what loyalty means. When an agent negotiates for the buyer, it is not swayed by advertising; it weighs trust, speed, compliance and the quality of your data. And when agents can team up across company boundaries, being the biggest one-stop shop stops being a structural advantage.
The agent economy is positioning to unseat SaaS, just as SaaS unseated the software that came before it. Every interaction can be personalised at no extra cost. The firms that build their context infrastructure first will set the standard everyone else has to match.
Your competitors can buy the models, not your learning loop. Let's build the moat that's yours.