#AI as a competitive edge (rethinking the competitive landscape) – the road ahead

Managers confronting disruptive change must act as leaders, and should approach the competitive landscape with the following awareness:

• What opportunities that we can exploit external forces are creating?
• How are we able to adopt and adapt concepts from other businesses?
• How long do we have to exploit the competitive edge before others react?
• What changes will customers or challengers notice about us using this advantage?

With so much uncertainty surrounding the development of #AI, executives are realising that this new technology could change everything, but nobody distinguishes exactly how or when (Zilis and Cham, 2016). Evidently, the impact of artificial intelligence as a transformative technology is already here, and #AI using clean data and powerful cloud analytics will drive sustainable competitive advantage. To combat ambiguity and simultaneously gain measurable competitive advantage, companies are encouraged to develop bundles of relevant short-term actions based on current trends. Furthermore, companies should plan adequately for future prospects by building up capabilities including adequate data infrastructure and create roadmaps tying together the different initiatives (Gerbert, Hecker et al. 2017).

If deployed correctly, #AI as an empowering umbrella of technologies can make a difference, #AI combined with machine learning can certainly help build models; models can predict outcomes for new sights and forecast outcomes, which have immense business and financial implications. Moreover, #AI and #ML can support businesses to leverage their data and discover derivative uses of their information to distil into something new for their competitive advantage (Held, 2017).

Researching the #AI topic, we have acknowledged that the majority of business managers anticipate substantial efficiencies increases of current products or processes from #AI applications. Nevertheless, improvement alone does not necessarily create a viable competitive advantage. According to (Ransbotham et al. 2017) “when everyone finds the same efficiencies, only the baseline shifts”.   

Figure 1: Competitive Advantage and Business Transformation Innovation

(Source: Jorge Lopez, 2013)

As such, to obtain a sizeable competitive advantage from #AI:

1. Companies must strategize to establish the appropriate partnership toward humans/machines synergy to build off each other’s strengths a tangible competitive advantage.
2. Companies must establish indispensable and flexible organisational structures, which introduce cultural changes for both company and employee.
3. (Papulova and Papulova, 2006, p. 3) reminded us more than a decade ago “real competitive advantage implies companies are able to satisfy customer needs more effectively than their competitors”.

Therefore, a tangible #AI-enabled competitive edge is attained if and when the real value is added for customers.