Who Wins with AI: Incumbents and Builders

Sangeet Paul Choudhary is the bestselling co-author of Platform Revolution, founder of Platformation Labs, senior fellow at UC Berkeley, and author of Reshuffle, exploring how AI fundamentally reorganizes value creation architecture.

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3:00 - Sangeet describes growing up in an industrial town where everyone's father worked at the steel plant, creating a homogeneous, "straight-jacketed" environment. Digital technologies opened new career possibilities beyond this rigid path.

5:45 - The Intelligence Distraction: Sangeet challenges the dominant narrative of AI benchmarked by intelligence metrics. "AI is not an alternative to human thought. It could be an alternative to human-performed knowledge work, but it's not an alternative to human thought."

8:30 - The GPS metaphor: AI's real impact comes from reorganizing systems, not raw intelligence. Like GPS restructures traffic flow by coordinating unconnected drivers, AI reorganizes economic activity by creating shared representations of complex spaces.

15:00 - Travel industry transformation: Dreaming on Instagram, planning on Google Flights, booking through fragmented systems. AI could create unified representations connecting desire to action seamlessly.

28:00 - Piracy as market research: "Piracy is a form of market research showing unmet demand." When illegal activity fills gaps, it reveals where legitimate systems fail to serve users.

35:00 - Platform economics: Network effects create winner-take-all dynamics. Once critical mass is achieved, platforms become nearly impossible to displace.

42:00 - Solution vs. execution: Professional services charging for billing hours face commoditization. The future belongs to those charging for outcomes and results, not execution time.

48:00 - Orica example: Mining explosives company stopped selling products, started selling blast outcomes. Shifted from commodity provider to results-aligned partner, capturing more value and developing superior expertise.

52:00 - Don't need AI strategy, need strategy for AI world: "What is our strategy given the conditions that AI creates?" AI dissolves industry boundaries by making previously siloed knowledge accessible across sectors.

54:30 - Value migration: Ask where value sat before, where it moves with AI, then position to capture that shifted value.

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