CONCEPT
Institutional Stickiness
The tendency of established institutional arrangements to persist because switching costs exceed the benefits of technically superior alternatives — soft power operating at organizational scale, and the mechanism that determines which ecosystems survive AI commodification.
Institutional stickiness is the term this book uses for the soft-power mechanism operating at organizational scale. It describes how established institutional arrangements — alliances, ecosystems, platforms, networks — persist because the accumulated investments in trust, integration, training, and shared understanding create switching costs that exceed the benefits of alternatives, even when alternatives are technically superior. The ecosystem does not compel its members to remain. It attracts them by making remaining more beneficial than leaving. This is Nye's definition of soft power applied to commercial and institutional domains, and it is the mechanism that determines which institutions the AI transition devalues and which it appreciates.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Consider Salesforce through the lens of institutional stickiness. No one uses Salesforce for its code. The code, in 2026, can be replicated by a competent developer with AI tools in an afternoon. Customers use Salesforce for the data layer built by twenty years of enterprise deployment, the integrations with thousands of