You Can’t Copy People, and AI Won’t Become Your Competitive Advantage
Part 1/5 of the essay series “Your Competitive Advantage Is Human”
Long before AI went mainstream, I spent years in IT, serving accountancy firms and rental-housing companies, among others. In those years I learned something few companies like to say out loud: almost everything a company invests in to stand out can be copied. Hardware, software, and processes are available to everyone. What’s left is the one thing a competitor cannot order, install, or replicate — and it’s exactly the thing that gets the least investment.
I remember precisely when this first dawned on me. I was running a competitive tender for my then employer’s website overhaul and social-media marketing. I went through the bids and met the agencies — and every single proposal and every company I met looked the same. The same promises, the same reference logos, in practice the same service. The only real differences lay in the quality of the selling: in how I was met, whether I was listened to, and whether the salesperson understood what we were actually trying to solve.
I was left wondering why, and the reason turned out to be obvious: everyone was working with the same tools and by the same rules set by the big American platforms. Google’s ad console is the same for everyone. Meta’s algorithm treats everyone alike. The publishing systems are the same. How could anyone stand out in that?
After that realisation I began to watch the phenomenon more widely. I was working in IT at the time, so I looked around me first: we and the competing IT houses were selling practically the same thing. The same servers, the same licences, the same certifications, the same process descriptions. Then I turned my gaze to our clients. The accountancy firms did their bookkeeping with the same software as their competitors. The rental-housing companies let flats with the same systems, the same contract templates, and the same marketplaces as everyone else. Wherever I looked, I saw heavily competed sectors where the means of production and the processes were the same for all — commodity work.
And yet some of these companies clearly did better than the others. With the same tools, the same prices, the same markets.
So what set the winners apart?
The claim: hardware, software, and processes can be copied by anyone
Common sense makes the matter simple. Anything you can buy, your competitor can buy too. Anything you can document as a process, your competitor can model. Anything a consultant can build for you, the same consultant — or their colleague — can build next door. Technology and processes are not a competitive advantage, because they lack the most important property of one: they are neither rare nor hard to imitate.
Hardware, software, and processes can be copied by anyone. People cannot.
What remains, then, is how people use and carry out these tools and processes. In my own experience this came down to two things.
The first was selling. In a commodity sector, where the services are nearly identical on paper, the customer ultimately buys from a person. A good salesperson stands out easily, because selling is largely human work: the ability to listen, to understand the customer’s real situation, and to build trust. You can’t install that on a server. In a commodity sector, the winner is the one whose people meet the customer best.
The second was expert work, the production itself — though with a caveat. An excellent specialist stands out, but the truth is that for many customers “good enough” is enough. When good enough is available on every corner, the quality of production stops being the decisive reason to buy, and the centre of gravity for standing out shifts even more firmly to the encounter: to how it feels to do business with your company.
This is not just a gut observation from one person’s career. There is both a classic of strategy research and a historical precedent for it.
What strategy research says: the VRIN test
One of the most influential ideas in strategy research is the resource-based view, formulated by Jay Barney in 1991. Its core idea is that sustained competitive advantage can arise only from resources that pass four criteria: a resource must be valuable, rare, hard to imitate, and hard to substitute. The criteria are known by the acronym VRIN (valuable, rare, inimitable, non-substitutable).
Let’s run the test. Is accountancy software valuable? Yes. Is it rare? No — every competitor can buy the same licence tomorrow. Is an ERP roll-out hard to imitate? No — the same integrator will deliver it for anyone. Technology and bought-in processes fail the VRIN test almost without exception, already at the second question.
And people? A team that has learned over years to work as one. A salesperson the customers trust. A culture where problems can be raised before they become crises. The tacit knowledge of how your particular customers want to be served. These are valuable, rare, and in practice impossible to copy — because they don’t live in systems but in the relationships between people, relationships built up over time, through a history all their own. A competitor can recruit an individual, but it cannot recruit a network of relationships, nor a culture.
In the language of strategy research: technology is a resource, but people and the ways they work together are a capability. Resources can be bought. A capability has to be grown.
We’ve seen this before: “IT Doesn’t Matter”
In 2003 Nicholas Carr published an essay in Harvard Business Review that infuriated the entire technology industry. Its title was “IT Doesn’t Matter”. Carr’s argument was that once technology becomes a commodity available to all — like electricity or the railways in their day — it stops being a source of strategic differentiation. Electricity was once a revolutionary competitive factor for the factories that got it first. Once every factory was electrified, electricity became a mere cost item, and competition was decided once again by other factors.
Carr did not claim that IT was irrelevant. He claimed that IT is necessary but not differentiating — in the same way that electricity is necessary, yet no one wins a market with their electricity connection. You’re obliged to make the investment to keep up, but it won’t take you to the front.
Two decades later, the same play is running as a rerun, with AI in the leading role. Every organisation acquires the same language models, the same licences, and the same copilots. The acquisition is necessary — but if your competitor can make an identical acquisition next week, the acquisition itself cannot be your competitive advantage. I’ll come back to this in the next part of the series, because with AI this logic is even more merciless than it was for the IT of Carr’s day.
“But what about Google and Amazon?”
Here someone rightly points out: aren’t the world’s most valuable companies precisely technology companies? Isn’t their competitive advantage in technology?
It’s a good objection, and there are two answers to it.
First, the giants’ advantage isn’t in the tools but in scale and data. Google’s search algorithm, without two decades of search data and the constant feedback loop of billions of users, would be just a clever program. Economies of scale and network effects are genuinely hard to imitate — but they are a different thing from technology as a tool. And, worth noting: those too were born, in their time, from people who knew how to build and exploit these structures before others did.
Second — and this matters more to most of my readers — the everyday reality of a Finnish SME, an accountancy firm, an IT house, or an industrial company is not a contest played by the logic of the platform giants. In their markets, the tools genuinely are the same for everyone. There, Carr’s logic and Barney’s VRIN test apply in full: technology keeps you in the game; people win it.
What this means in practice — do this tomorrow
- Take a “copyability inventory”. List your business’s key competitive factors — technologies, processes, services, certifications, pricing models. For each one, ask: could a well-resourced competitor copy this in 12 months? Everything that answers “yes” is necessary to stay in the game, but it is not your competitive advantage. What’s left on the list tells you where your real advantage lies. For most people the list is short — and every line on it has to do with people.
- Interview your best salesperson and your best specialist. Ask them what, in their work, creates the most value for the customer. The answer is rarely “software X” or “process Y”. It’s usually something written in no process description: the knack of asking the right question at the right moment, the ability to notice what the customer doesn’t say out loud, the courage to recommend a smaller solution than the one the customer asked for. Once you’ve heard the answers, ask yourself: do we lead, measure, and reward this — or something else entirely?
- Move one development euro from technology to the encounter. Pick one of this year’s development investments aimed at tools, and redirect it instead to people’s skills in meeting, listening, or selling. Track customer feedback, upselling, and customer retention for six months. I’d wager the return surprises you — and, unlike a software investment, this one doesn’t go out of date at the next version update.
In closing: why this matters more now than ever
Someone may read this and think: old news, people have always mattered. True. But what’s under way now is a shift that takes this old truth to an entirely new scale.
AI turns technology into a commodity faster than any earlier wave of technology. The same models, the same tools, and soon the same agents are available to every organisation — the small and the large, the challenger and the market leader. When the price of cognitive output collapses for everyone at once, the copyable share of a business grows even larger. And then what does not copy decides even more.
That’s why I argue that AI is, at bottom, about the role of the human being. In the next part of the series I’ll tell you what I’ve learned from helping leadership teams adopt AI in dozens of organisations — and why every one of them thought it was unique, even though they all had the same challenges and the same benefits on offer. Spoiler: that observation, too, confirms the claim of this essay.
I speak about these themes in keynotes, leadership-team coaching, and panel discussions. If you’d like to challenge your organisation’s thinking about technology, people, and competitive advantage, get in touch → lenni@lennilaukkanen.fi
Sources
- Barney, J. (1991). Firm Resources and Sustained Competitive Advantage. Journal of Management, 17(1), 99–120.
- Carr, N. (2003). IT Doesn’t Matter. Harvard Business Review, May 2003.
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