Where should you focus your efforts?

AI tools keep getting absorbed into bigger platforms. It’s happened ten times in three years, and the pace is picking up. Here’s what it means for smaller operators — and where to actually put your attention.

Something has been happening in AI for the past three years that doesn’t get talked about enough. Every few months, a tool that businesses were paying for — a writing assistant, a data analyser, a chatbot builder — quietly gets replaced by a feature built into a platform they already use.

It started with the AI writing tools. ChatGPT arrived in late 2022 and within a year, Jasper had lost roughly 70% of its revenue. Copy.ai laid people off. Not because they were bad products — because the capability they were selling got baked into something bigger for free.

Then it happened with image analysis, data analysis, research tools, browser automation.

If you run a business and you’ve been watching all this, the temptation is to treat it as a technology problem. Which AI tool do I pick? Which platform is going to survive? Should I wait until the dust settles?

The tools will keep changing. Platforms will keep absorbing features. Something you pay for today will probably be free in eighteen months. That’s not speculation. It’s the pattern.

So where should you focus?

Not on the tools themselves. Everyone has access to the same tools. That stopped being an advantage the moment the tools became widely available — which happened faster than anyone expected.

The thing that doesn’t get absorbed is context. Your market. Your customers. The specific friction in your pipeline. The reason your leads go cold between enquiry and deal. The message that works for your sector in this city, not a generic version of it.

AI is extremely good at generation. Given a clear brief, it produces — copy, analysis, images, code — faster and cheaper than any team you could hire. That part is largely solved. What isn’t solved is the brief. Knowing what to ask for, in what order, aimed at which outcome.

The businesses that are going to get left behind aren’t the ones using the wrong AI tool. They’re the ones assuming that access to the tool is the same as knowing how to use it well. It isn’t. It never was, with any technology.

Three things worth doing now

Stop auditing tools and start auditing workflows. Where in your business does work slow down, get dropped, or produce inconsistent results? That’s where AI can help. Not in the abstract — in that specific place, on that specific problem.

Own your context. The brief, the brand voice, the customer data, the feedback loop — that’s yours. The model doesn’t have it. A competitor using the same model doesn’t have it. That’s your edge, and it compounds every time you use it.

Find someone with judgment, not someone with access. Everyone has access now. What matters is whether the person helping you understands your business well enough to make the technology work for your specific situation. If they don’t, the tool won’t save you. If they do, every new model release makes you faster.

The labs will keep absorbing features. The tools will keep changing. That’s fine. The underlying question — what does this business need, in what order, delivered how — stays the same. Answer that well and the technology works for you. Leave it unanswered and you’ll keep shopping for tools that don’t stick.