Shekar Natarajan is the founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI.
In 1879, when Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he probably had no idea the level of possibility that singular invention sparked. It wasn’t the filament that transformed the world. It was the power infrastructure that lit up cities, reimagined businesses and reshaped society. AI is today’s light bulb. It has moved from a novelty to a shared utility. And that shift has created a dangerous illusion: If everyone uses the same AI tools, every company will become the same.
This is the myth of convergence, fueling concerns that AI will flatten the field, that strategy becomes irrelevant when everyone has access to the same intelligence. While that belief isn’t just wrong, it misconstrues what AI is and what it does.
Tools Are Shared—Intent Is Not
AI models are becoming like electricity or water: ubiquitous and utility-grade. OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, DeepSeek—the list is growing every day. But access does not equal advantage. The model is not the differentiator. The value comes from what a company does with it.
Every car company can buy the same engine, for example. But Toyota used it to perfect a production system. Porsche made it a performance machine. Ford built a middle-class economy car. The engine was a tool, but the intent made it transformational.
The same goes for AI. What matters is how you integrate it into your business loops, how you train it on proprietary data and how you shape its outputs to reflect your operational DNA. AI doesn’t erase uniqueness. It reveals it.
Your Data Is Your Competitive Identity
AI thrives on context. Without the right signals, even the best model is guessing. That’s why your proprietary data—the transactions, behaviors, workflows and anomalies only you can see—is your most valuable asset.
Take Delta Airlines. They didn’t just plug in a model. They trained it on decades of data: maintenance records, gate usage, crew logistics, storm response, passenger patterns. The result? An AI system that predicts and resolves disruptions faster than any competitor. Delta now leads the industry in on-time arrivals and completion rates.
Now imagine a smaller airline licensing that same software but without Delta’s data. Same interface, different outcomes. You can’t skip to intelligence without history. AI doesn’t generate wisdom. It amplifies it.
The Process Is The Product
Where AI truly reshapes business is in how it changes the quality of questions companies ask. Strategy used to be about making better decisions. Now it’s about designing better questions.
Look at agriculture. In India, mobile AI tools identify crop diseases and optimize water use across vast, fragmented farmlands. In the Netherlands, AI manages precision greenhouse environments down to the minute. Same base technology, with radically different implementations. Each solution is a mirror of the ecosystem it serves.
Used well, AI is a magnifying lens for your processes, your constraints and your ambitions. How you shape it—the data you feed it and the direction you give it—shapes what you get. If you’re not asking smart, strategic questions, you won’t get smart, strategic answers.
Strategy Over Software
Companies chasing AI to automate decisions are missing the bigger picture. AI does not replace leadership. It scales it. A weak strategy, amplified by AI, becomes a faster way to fail. But a bold, clear strategy becomes a competitive engine.
Look at the Port of Singapore. They didn’t use AI to speed up legacy workflows. Instead, they reimagined operations entirely. The system allocates docking slots, reorganizes freight and reroutes supply chains based on weather, tide and geopolitics. That’s not automation. That’s reinvention.
The same is true in banking. Singapore’s DBS Bank transformed its performance and became a global digital leader by unifying fragmented customer data into a single view. They uncovered over 30,000 unique customer signals. That shift, from siloed systems to integrated insight, transformed how they operated and served.
AI Exposes Identity—It Doesn’t Create It
AI won’t make you special. Your strategy, your processes, your data discipline—these are what give AI something to amplify.
Companies that haven’t invested in their data, culture and context will find that AI only exposes the cracks. But those with a clear point of view and a mature information architecture will find new ways to differentiate, grow and lead.
The question isn’t whether AI will level the playing field. It’s whether you’ve built a company worth scaling. Because in the end, AI isn’t the answer. It’s a force multiplier for the questions you already know how to ask.
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