CONCEPT
Competitor Vertex
The third of Ohmae's three Cs — transformed in the AI age by the collapse of entry barriers, the democratization of production, and the emergence of competitors whose cost structures the incumbent framework cannot see.
The competitor vertex is what other players can do. The AI moment has transformed it most dramatically of the three vertices. When the cost of execution drops to near zero, the barriers to entry in virtually every industry drop alongside it. A startup of three people with AI tools can now produce at a level that previously required fifty. A solo builder — the phenomenon Segal documents through the case of Alex Finn — can create a revenue-generating product without a team, without institutional backing, without capital that traditionally gated entry. The incumbent's traditional moats — engineering scale, technical depth, accumulated codebase — have been breached, not because the incumbent has weakened but because the cost structure that made the moats effective has changed.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The new competitors do not compete with incumbents on incumbent terms. They compete on terms that the incumbent's cost structure cannot match — speed, customization, direct customer intimacy