EP 577: AI Isn't Your Company’s Advantage. AI Is Just the Internet.
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: EP 577: AI Isn’t Your Company’s Advantage. AI Is Just the Internet.
This episode of the Everyday AI Show, hosted by Jordan Wilson, delivers a strong “hot take” arguing that the perception of Generative AI (GenAI) as a competitive advantage is outdated and dangerous for businesses in 2025. The central thesis is that AI has transitioned from a disruptive technology to foundational infrastructure, equivalent to the internet or electricity. Companies still marketing themselves as “AI-powered” risk being seen as archaic and will be overtaken by more agile competitors.
1. Focus Area: The primary focus is on the strategic and marketing misalignment regarding Generative AI adoption within established enterprises. The discussion centers on moving beyond superficial AI implementation (“slapping AI-powered on the website”) to treating AI as a necessary utility that must permeate all business functions.
2. Key Technical Insights:
- AI as Baseline Infrastructure: AI capabilities (like LLMs) are rapidly becoming the expected baseline for operations, similar to how the internet is no longer a differentiator.
- Blurring Lines in User Experience: Consumers are increasingly using AI (e.g., Google’s AI Overviews, Copilot integration) without realizing it, leading to lowered tolerance for manual, non-AI-enhanced business processes.
- LLM Maturity and Direct Access: LLMs are becoming robust enough to cut out traditional middlemen by directly accessing and processing dynamic company data, changing integration needs (though RAG pipelines remain relevant).
3. Business/Investment Angle:
- The “Internet Test”: Companies should test their AI strategy by swapping “AI” with “internet.” If the resulting statement sounds ridiculous (e.g., “We are an internet-powered company”), the AI strategy is likely weak.
- ROI Window Closing: Early adopters saw significant returns ($3.70 for every $1 invested, per IDC/Microsoft), but late adopters (74% according to BCG) struggle to measure positive ROI because they missed the initial profit window.
- Talent Disruption: Companies laying off staff due to AI implementation will see those displaced, skilled employees form smaller, agile competitors that quickly eat the lunch of the slower, legacy firms.
4. Notable Companies/People:
- Sam Altman (OpenAI CEO): Mentioned for his prediction that one-person unicorn companies will emerge due to AI leverage (though the host suggests this is an anomaly).
- Microsoft: Cited as an example of the dichotomy: laying off tens of thousands of employees due to AI efficiency while simultaneously investing billions (e.g., $4 billion in Microsoft Elevate) to train people on AI.
- Google: Highlighted for seamlessly integrating AI into search (AI Overviews) where 47% of queries show AI results automatically, proving AI integration can be invisible to the end-user.
- Adobe, Nvidia: Mentioned as innovative companies partnering with the podcast host for AI education, indicating they are proactive in the space.
5. Future Implications: The industry is heading toward a state where non-AI-native companies will be viewed with suspicion, similar to a business today lacking a website or phone number. Customer expectations are rapidly shifting toward personalized, high-quality, context-rich information delivered instantly, driven by personal AI usage. Companies must stop bragging about basic AI plumbing and focus on deep, structural transformation.
6. Target Audience: This episode is highly valuable for Business Leaders, C-Suite Executives, and Technology Strategists who are responsible for setting company-wide AI roadmaps and marketing positioning. It is aimed at professionals who need to move past the hype cycle and adopt a pragmatic, infrastructure-level view of AI integration.
Comprehensive Summary:
Host Jordan Wilson delivers a forceful critique of how most established companies are still treating Generative AI—as a special, differentiating feature rather than essential infrastructure. He argues that in 2025, claiming to be “AI-powered” is as meaningless as claiming to be “internet-enabled” 15 years ago. Companies relying on this superficial positioning risk being laughed out of the market by smaller, faster competitors.
Wilson outlines three key areas where businesses are failing: (1) Marketing Hype: Slapping “AI-powered” on marketing materials is seen as foolish because customers already expect it. (2) Strategic Lag: Enterprises are applying outdated digital transformation blueprints to AI, causing them to miss crucial ROI windows. (3) Customer Expectation Shift: As consumers use AI seamlessly in their personal lives (e.g., Google Search), their tolerance for archaic, manual business processes is plummeting; the expectation is that customer service will be 95% AI-driven by year-end.
The host stresses that AI is now basic utility, like electricity, and should power every facet of the business without needing to be explicitly advertised. He points to data showing early AI adopters significantly outperformed late adopters, who are now struggling to justify their investment.
Wilson concludes by offering three actionable steps for companies to pivot their strategy: (1) Mandatory Training: Train every employee on LLM basics, treating it like providing a computer. (2) Stop Bragging About Plumbing: Shift focus from using AI to building meaningful value with it. (3) Embrace the New Reality: Recognize that AI is fundamentally changing knowledge work, eliminating unnecessary manual steps, and demanding higher quality, personalized output faster than ever before. The failure to adopt this mindset will lead to mass layoffs followed by the rise of highly efficient, AI-native startups built by the very talent those large companies let
🏢 Companies Mentioned
💬 Key Insights
"Number one, train every single employee on large language model and generative AI basics. Number two, focus on developing internal use cases and benchmarks for your specific business. And three, develop a first-party data collection team that feeds your AI unique reasoning information."
"You need to be focusing on the future of AI, which is agentic AI, which is when you hand over decision-making processes to AI agents."
"RAG is not enough. As we look at agentic AI, you need to start collecting reasoning data from your leaders, right? ... You need to be collecting the expertise. You need to be collecting reasoning. You need to be collecting, curating, cleaning, logic."
"You need to focus on developing internal use cases and benchmarks for your company. Not enough, not enough organizations are doing that, right? It's fine to rely on third-party benchmarks... But there's a certain point where large language models for a large part can become a commodity."
"You're going to go out of business if you honestly think that using AI to do A, B, and C is special. I don't want to talk to you because there's a good chance that your company is going to go out of business if that's still your mindset, if you still think that using generative AI wrapped in your data is something to brag about. It's not two and a half years ago. Yes, two years ago. Yes. A year and a half ago. Maybe in 2025, absolutely not."
"Customers assume that you're using AI just like they assume that you have electricity. So stop bragging about the plumbing. And start building something with it."