Imagine a newspaper editor in about 1998. Circulation is solid. The printing presses are paid for. The vans go out every morning. Advertisers have nowhere else to go.
If you'd asked that editor what their business was protected by, they'd probably have said the journalism. The writers, the scoops, the brand.
They'd have been wrong.
Jason Thomson, SVP of Innovation at Mintel, told that story at aiblLIVE in London on 20 October. "Newspapers sold news and advertising," he said, "but their moat was printing and distribution. The internet didn't kill demand for news." It just made the moat irrelevant.
The least interesting thing about AI
Jason opened his talk by saying he'd spend fifteen minutes arguing that efficiency is the least interesting thing about AI. That's a brave line to open with at an AI conference.
His reasoning was simple. "We're all chasing the same thing: doing what we already do faster and cheaper. We've got so many competitors, and you can only save money once."
Cut a process from five days to one and you've made a saving. Brilliant. Next year, you can't cut it again. Neither can you stop your competitors making the same cut, using the same tools, on the same day.
The better question, he said, is: what can we do now that we couldn't do before?
Back to the moat
He left the room with two questions. Both are worth stealing.
What are your customers actually buying? And what's your moat?
For Mintel, the honest answer turned out to be surprising for a company famous for data. Jason said their clients buy "the confidence to make a decision". The data is just how they get there. If AI can produce data cheaply, the data stops being special. The confidence still is.
His team, a futures team of three, has a sign on the wall that says it plainly: "The Futures Team's job isn't to protect the business. It's to find what replaces it."
And the line that should make every owner sit up: "The most dangerous competitor makes your moat irrelevant."
If you coach, or run a business
This is where it got personal for me. I spend a lot of time around business owners and coaches, and I've been delivering AI sessions to them lately. Almost all of the questions I get are about efficiency. How do I write posts faster, answer emails quicker and spend less time on admin?
All good questions. All the kind of saving you only get once.
The bigger question is what your customers are really paying for. A bookkeeper's clients might think they're buying tax returns. What they're really buying is a good night's sleep. An accountant's clients buy less fear about HMRC. A personal trainer's clients buy someone who'll notice when they don't turn up.
If AI makes the visible part of what you do cheap, the invisible part becomes the whole business. That's either a threat or the best news you'll get all year, depending on whether you know what it is.
Suppose a competitor launched tomorrow, doing your core service for a tenth of the price with AI.
The natural first reaction is panic. A better one is to ask what that competitor still couldn't do. That's your moat. That's what you build on, talk about and charge for.
Jason's exercise is a good one to borrow. List what your customers buy, then cross out anything a machine could produce cheaply in a year's time. What's still on your list?
