The Generic AI Trap: Why Building for Everyone is a Strategy for No One

In 2012, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, captured a fundamental truth of product strategy: "When you build technology for everyone, it ends up being for no one. Focus on the few, then build for the many."

Over a decade later, this insight has become the most expensive lesson for CEOs navigating the AI shift.

The market is currently flooded with "AI for everyone" strategies. Boards are demanding "AI integration" and teams are responding by skinning generic LLMs over legacy workflows. This is not a strategy; it is a subsidy. When you build on generic infrastructure to solve generic problems, you are paying a "competitor tax" to the foundational model providers while building zero defensibility for yourself.

If your AI strategy can be replicated by a competitor with a credit card and a weekend of prompt engineering, you aren't building a moat. You’re building on quicksand.

The Problem: The High Cost of Horizontal Ambition

Most AI consultancies sell horizontal breadth. They promise to "AI-enable" your entire organization, from HR to marketing. This incrementalism is the enemy of monopoly. By attempting to apply AI across the board to "everyone" in the company, you dilute your focus and fail to architect a deep, proprietary data advantage in any single area.

Horizontal AI—tools that "improve" or "enhance" existing tasks—creates a temporary efficiency gain that is quickly competed away. If everyone in your industry uses the same generic tools to achieve the same 20% efficiency gain, the baseline for competition simply shifts. No one wins; the consumer captures the value, and the model providers capture the profit.

To escape the commodity trap, you must stop looking for tools that work for everyone and start architecting an operating system that works specifically—and exclusively—for your most defensible workflows.

The Insight: The Specificity Moat™

At ThinkDefineCreate AI, we operate on a contrarian premise: The narrower the initial focus, the wider the eventual moat.

The "few" that Levie refers to are your high-leverage, proprietary workflows—the 5% of your business that generates 95% of your competitive advantage. While your competitors are busy trying to teach their sales teams how to write better emails with ChatGPT, the future monopoly holder is re-architecting the core logic of their industry.

The path to a last-mover advantage—the position of being the final, dominant player in a category—requires an inversion of typical AI adoption. Instead of asking "How can AI help my people?", you must ask "What proprietary data and workflow logic can we codify into a system that makes our execution impossible to replicate?"

The Architecture: The Precision-Scale Inversion

To turn Levie’s insight into a strategic framework, we use the Precision-Scale Inversion. This model guides how we architect AI monopolies:

1. Phase 01: Think (The Radical Narrowing) Identify the "Sacred Cow" workflow—a process so complex, data-rich, or industry-specific that generic AI fails to touch it. This is your "few." For a global logistics firm, this isn't "route optimization" (a commodity); it’s the proprietary logic used to navigate localized regulatory arbitrage and port-side relationships.
2. Phase 02: Define (Architectural Locking) Build a proprietary Operating System around this specific workflow. You are not using AI as a tool; you are building an OS where the AI is the workflow. This system must capture data that no one else sees, creating a compounding feedback loop where the more the system is used, the harder it becomes for a generic model to catch up.
3. Phase 03: Create (The Monopoly Expansion) Once you own the "few" (the core defensible capability), you expand to the "many." You don't sell a tool; you become the industry standard. Your competitors eventually find themselves forced to interface with your system or become obsolete. You have moved from "participating" in the market to "owning" its operating logic.

From Tooling to Operating Systems

The shift from "everyone" to "the few" is a shift from tools to systems.

Generic AI tools are "leaky." They leak your intent to the model providers and provide outputs that your competitors can easily mimic. A proprietary AI Operating System, however, is a vault. It integrates deeply with your unique data moats—the messy, unstructured, and private information that a generic crawler will never see.

For example, a Tier-1 Private Equity firm doesn't need an AI that summarizes reports (everyone has that). They need an AI OS that architects their proprietary investment thesis into a predictive engine for mid-market manufacturing. By focusing on that "few"—the specific logic of their unique alpha—they build a system that allows them to move with a speed and certainty that generic "AI-enabled" firms cannot match.

The Action: How to Stop Competing

If you are an executive ready to move beyond incrementalism, the steps are direct:

• Kill the Pilot Projects: Stop funding "proof-of-concepts" that aim for broad, shallow gains. If a project doesn't have the potential to create a defensible moat, it is a distraction.
• Identify Your Proprietary Logic: What is the specific knowledge in your company that "everyone" doesn't have? That is where your AI architecture begins.
• Own the Capability, Not the Vendor: Avoid vendor dependency. Architect your systems so that you own the internal literacy and the production-grade deployment.
• Commit to the Architectural Shift: AI transformation is not a technical upgrade; it is a leadership challenge. It requires the courage to re-engineer workflows that have existed for decades.

Secure Your Last-Mover Position

The window to build a defensible AI monopoly is closing. As generic AI becomes a utility, the only remaining value will be found in the specific, the proprietary, and the architectural.

Competition is a tax you no longer have to pay. Stop building for everyone. Start architecting the system that makes you the only one who matters in your category.

Schedule an AI Monopoly Audit™ today to identify where you can stop competing and start owning.