CONCEPT
Customer Vertex
The second of Ohmae's three Cs — transformed in the AI age by two opposing forces: the escalation of baseline expectations and the exposure of customer needs previously invisible because they were economically unfeasible to serve.
The customer vertex is what the customer needs and what the customer will accept. The AI moment has transformed it twice over, in ways that pull in opposite directions. First, expectations have escalated: when AI-augmented production becomes available at commodity pricing, the customer's baseline expectation rises to meet the new floor, compressing margins for any corporation competing on execution quality alone. Second — and more strategically significant — the collapse of production costs has exposed customer needs that were always there but were economically invisible. The standardized products that served the compromise between what customers wanted and what was feasible to deliver lose their justification when custom alternatives cost the same. The customer's real needs emerge into the competitive landscape for the first time.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The mechanism is straightforward. When building a custom solution was expensive, customers accepted standardized products that approximately met their needs. The gap between what they actually wanted