CONCEPT
Execution Commoditization
Porter's strategic lens applied to the AI moment: the transformation of execution activities—code generation, design production, legal drafting—from scarce sources of competitive differentiation into universally available table stakes, forcing the migration of competitive advantage to the judgment activities that AI cannot perform.
When every competitor has access to the same capability at the same price, that capability ceases to be a source of competitive advantage. This is the oldest principle in
Porter's framework, and it is the structural fact that the AI transition has produced at extraordinary speed across the entire knowledge-work economy. Before December 2025, writing production-quality code required years of specialized training and the kind of embodied pattern recognition that accumulated only through thousands of hours of debugging. That scarcity was a genuine barrier—the firm that had assembled a team of excellent executors possessed something competitors could not quickly replicate.
Large language models dissolved these barriers with a speed that the frameworks of gradual technological diffusion cannot explain. In
[YOU] on AI, a Google engineer received a working prototype in an hour that her team had spent a year building. The twenty engineers trained in Trivandrum achieved a twenty-fold productivity increase