Ankur Shah is the cofounder and CEO of Straiker.
getty
Most software has become replaceable. Open any category page. You’ll see 30 tools. Half launched this year. Half of those are wrappers on top of the same three models. Customers, builders and investors know it. Nobody wants to say it out loud because everyone is trying to sell something in the same panic.
Here is the version I tell my team:
That distinction matters. Forgettable software is what most of us have built over the last fifteen years: workflow automation, dashboards, CRUD (create, read, update and delete) apps and CRUD with a chatbot bolted on. Anything an AI agent can absorb in a sprint. That layer is collapsing in real time. The companies that will matter in five years are running toward what survives the collapse.
AI compresses time. What used to take 40 engineers two years now takes four engineers two months. Whole categories get cloned on a weekend.
At the same time, the distribution playbook is breaking:
• Search is becoming conversational: SEO from 2022 doesn’t work in 2026.
• Discovery is intermediated by agents and copilots, not browsers.
• Interfaces are converging: chat, voice, action on top of the same handful of foundation models.
Features, integrations and user experience (UX) have defined the competitive surface of the last two decades. That surface has now been compressed almost to zero. Most SaaS categories are flattening into interchangeable, AI-wrapped commodities. Copilots, chat interfaces, automation layers, agents—everyone has them. The “AI-native” badge has already stopped meaning anything.
The cost of building software is collapsing. The cost of building conviction is rising.
I’ve talked to north of 500 enterprise CISOs and CTOs in the last 18 months. The ones running the most ambitious AI deployments are also the ones asking the most pointed questions about buying. They aren’t asking,“Does this have AI?” They’re asking,“Can I trust this in five years?”
Five things compound in that direction.
In the AI era, verbosity is free and clarity is expensive. Anyone can ship a 50-page deck before lunch. Few founders can explain in one page what their company does, why it matters and why it’s different.
If you cannot explain your company clearly in one page, AI will expose that before your competitors do.
Models are a commodity. Context is not. The companies that compound are sitting on unique data, runtime telemetry, customer-specific workflows and real-world feedback loops that no foundation model has access to.
When everyone has intelligence, intelligence stops being the moat. Context becomes the moat.
This is the one I’d bet hardest on. In security, finance, healthcare and critical infrastructure, autonomous systems don’t get adopted because they’re impressive. They get adopted because somebody vouches for them. Buyers in regulated industries aren’t asking, “Does this use AI?” They’re asking, “Can I trust this system when it matters most?” Trust compounds the way capital does. Slowly, and then all at once.
AI accelerates iteration for everyone. The winners aren’t the teams that iterate fastest. They’re the teams that understand fastest. Every great team I’ve worked with had this in common: they were unembarrassed about being wrong, and merciless about not staying wrong.
The least-discussed and possibly most important asset. In a world drowning in AI-generated slop, the premium goes to the human judgment that can tell what’s good from what’s noise. Taste in product. Taste in design. Taste in how you talk to a customer.
Strong opinions, well-held, become a strategic asset.
Identity compounds. Features depreciate. AI will copy any feature you ship inside a quarter.
The companies that survive this wave will stand for something unmistakable. A reputation in a regulated industry. A point of view that customers associate with you, not the category. When somebody inside your customer’s organization says your name, the room should already know what you mean.
That doesn’t get built by adding SKUs. It gets built by saying no to most of them.
In the SaaS era, the moat was the software. Switching cost was implementation pain. Differentiation was features. In the AI era, the software is the cheapest part. AI makes technical switching trivial.
AI will ultimately reward organizations that combine technological capability with human judgment. While AI may commoditize many tasks, it will also amplify the value of companies that possess unique knowledge, clear thinking and the discipline to communicate with precision.
AI makes switching easier technically. Enduring companies make switching harder strategically.
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