AI Isn't the First Wave. It's Just the One You're In.

Every company that lost its market position to disruption saw it coming. Kodak built the digital camera. BlackBerry had the enterprise relationships. Nokia had the prototype. None of it was enough – because seeing the shift isn’t the same as positioning against it. And most B2B firms today are making exactly the same mistake, just with different technology.

This has happened before.

Let’s remember the early 2000s. Low-rise jeans. The Strokes. A collective global panic about whether computers would simply stop working at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, which they didn’t, which everyone then felt slightly embarrassed about. It was a specific kind of moment – one where the threat everyone was watching turned out not to be the threat at all.

While the UK technology services industry was busy being fine, something quieter was happening. Indian firms were entering the market. They weren’t, by conventional measures, threatening. They didn’t have the accumulated relationships, the established reputations, or the institutional gravitas that incumbents had spent decades building. The incumbents looked at this and were, understandably, unbothered.

They noted it. They discussed it, presumably. They concluded that the clients who mattered would stay with the firms they knew.

Blockbuster had a similar conversation about Netflix in the early 2000s. Netflix was mailing DVDs to people in red envelopes, which is, if you think about it, a quite labour-intensive way to watch a film. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores. They had brand recognition, established infrastructure, and a customer base that was already showing up. Netflix had postage. The conclusion Blockbuster reached – that this was a niche inconvenience rather than an existential threat – was, at the time, not obviously wrong.

The new entrants grew, in both cases, not because they were better, exactly. They grew because they had nothing to protect. No pricing structure the whole business depended on. No relationship so significant they couldn’t afford to lose it, and therefore couldn’t afford to change anything that might risk it. No margin that had quietly become the floor beneath which the business couldn’t go.

The innovator’s dilemma isn’t really a technology problem. It’s a problem about what happens when the accumulated evidence of your success becomes the strongest argument against changing anything.

“We are tracking this carefully.”

Kodak invented digital photography. Not metaphorically. Not in the sense of seeing it coming and making some adjacent moves. An engineer at Kodak built the first digital camera in 1975. The company understood, with considerable precision, what the technology would do to film. They had the internal reports. They ran the projections. They knew.

They also made 80% of their profit from film.

Changing your positioning while the existing model is still working is a difficult argument to make in a room full of people whose livelihoods depend on the existing model continuing to work. This isn’t a failure of intelligence. It’s a failure of conditions.

The businesses most at risk right now aren’t the ones that missed the AI transition. They’re the ones paying close attention. They’ve seen the demos. They’ve read the reports. They’ve had the internal conversations about what this means and produced, in several cases, a document summarising the conclusions. They understand, intellectually, that things are shifting.

What they haven’t done is change their positioning.

Most businesses that lose their market position don’t experience it as a dramatic fall. They experience it as a series of decisions that felt entirely sensible at the time but turned out, looking back, to have been optimising the wrong thing. A slight upward drift in fees, justified by reputation. A slight reduction in what’s included, justified by efficiency. A slight narrowing of whom they’re for, justified by focus.

Each decision, examined on its own, is fine. The pattern, examined from the outside, looks rather like a business that spent several years making itself easier to replace.

The future, in these situations, doesn’t arrive as a moment. It arrives as a set of conditions that were already there while everyone was carefully tracking things.

“We have something they don’t.”

In 2007, BlackBerry was the smartphone. Not a contender. Not one of several options. The thing itself. Enterprises trusted it. Governments used it. The physical keyboard was considered not a legacy feature but a genuine advantage. Their users were, famously, addicted to the things. There’s a reason they were called CrackBerries.

BlackBerry had something the new entrants didn’t: penetration into every major enterprise, security infrastructure that had taken years to build, and a customer base that had structured workflows around the device. These were real assets. They weren’t nothing.

What BlackBerry didn’t account for was that their assets were also their constraints. The enterprise relationships made it difficult to move downmarket. The security infrastructure made the software slow. The keyboard, which their users loved, made it almost impossible to build the kind of interface that turned out to be what the market actually wanted.

The thing they had that the new entrants didn’t turned out to be exactly the thing that stopped them from adapting.

Positioning isn’t a description of what you do. It’s the market’s belief about why you, specifically. And to understand that clearly, you have to ask a more precise question than most businesses are willing to sit with: if you didn’t exist, what would your clients spend this money on?

For most B2B professional services firms, that question used to produce a familiar set of answers. Other firms. Recognisable competitors. Alternatives that looked more or less like you. That alternatives set is changing now, in a specific and structural way. For a growing number of clients, the honest answer includes AI and simply doing it themselves.

A positioning that doesn’t account for that isn’t really positioning. It’s a description of a competitive landscape that’s quietly stopped being the one you’re operating in. The question isn’t whether your clients are capable of reaching that conclusion. They already are.

Market beliefs aren’t assets in the conventional sense. They aren’t accumulated and stored. They’re rebuilt constantly by whatever the market is currently living through. The story most businesses tell about themselves tends to be a story about what they’ve accumulated. It’s a reasonable story. It’s also, structurally, a story about the past. What doesn’t get asked often enough is whether that story is the one the market’s currently interested in – and whether the alternative the market is now reaching for even looks like a competitor.

“We will know when to move.”

Nokia had working touchscreen prototypes before the iPhone launched. This is not a rumour. They had the technology, the scale, the global distribution, and the brand recognition to have built what Apple built. What they were waiting for, apparently, was clearer evidence that the market wanted it.

The market demonstrated this quite clearly in 2007. Nokia responded. They just did so in the way that a company responds when it’s trying to protect what it already has rather than build what’s coming next, which is to say, slowly, carefully, and about four years too late.

The difficulty with knowing when to move is that the moment you know is typically the moment after things have already shifted.

The AI transition isn’t something that might happen. It’s already in the conditions. Not in the headlines, not in the conference panels, but in the structural conditions: who’s entering your market without a business model to defend, what they can now deliver that previously required a decade of accumulated expertise, and what your existing clients now know they can ask for – or do themselves. The question isn’t whether it’ll change how professional services firms compete. It’s only who’ll have positioned themselves against what’s coming, rather than what’s already happened.

The businesses that find themselves in difficulty mostly won’t be the ones that ignored this entirely. They’ll be the ones that understood it well enough and carried on managing the existing model because the existing model was still working.

Which, for a while, it was.

Blockbuster saw Netflix. Kodak built the camera. BlackBerry had the relationships. Nokia had the prototype. None of it was enough, because none of it was the same as actually changing.

“If we didn’t exist, what would our clients spend this money on?”

That’s the right positioning question right now. For most B2B firms, the honest answer used to involve other firms. Recognisable competitors. Alternatives that looked more or less like you. That’s changed. For a growing number of clients, the answer now includes AI and simply doing it themselves. A positioning that doesn’t account for that isn’t positioning against the actual alternatives – it’s positioning against a competitive landscape that’s quietly stopped being the one you’re operating in. There’s a version of your business that’s what you’ve built, a version that’s what the market currently believes about you, and a version that accounts for what the market can now do without you. The question isn’t which of those is most accurate right now. The question is which one you’re investing in.

About Always Obvious

We help software firms become the obvious choice in the age of AI. We work with founders who’re struggling to orientate their business in rapidly evolving markets – the ones whose ideas are dying in translation while less interesting competitors thrive through clarity. Our method is Continuous Positioning: not a one-time exercise, not a document that gathers dust, but an ongoing operating system that ensures the right businesses become the obvious choice. Because when purpose-driven companies master positioning as a discipline, everyone wins except the cynics.