Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
AI is changing the decisions businesses face. It does not replace the fundamentals of strategy, leadership, or judgment.
AI & The Boardroom explores what AI changes, what it doesn’t, and what leaders need to decide.
Hosted by Jean Dorff of Jean Dorff Consultancy, the show is for CEOs, business owners, executives, directors, and others responsible for strategy, growth, and organizational change.
Each episode looks beyond the tools and the hype to examine the business questions underneath: competition, differentiation, efficiency, risk, organizational behavior, and decision-making.
The question is not simply whether to adopt AI. It is where AI belongs, where it does not, what deserves attention now, and what should remain unchanged.
Welcome to AI in the Boardroom. AI is changing the decisions
businesses face. It does not replace strategy, leadership,
or judgment. It changes what leaders must account for. This show
looks beyond the tools and the hype. Each episode examines where
AI is changing competition, growth, and the way organizations
work, and what leaders need to decide in response. What AI
changes, what it doesn't, what leaders need to decide. AI
AI and the Boardroom, with your host, Sean Dorf. A A competitor announces a
significant discount. Your marketing team sees it. Your sales team
starts asking questions. And before long, someone suggests that
perhaps you should lower your prices too. But what if the
competitor isn't really competing on price? What if the
discount is simply the visible part of a very different business strategy?
In today's episode of AI in the Boardroom, Jean Dorff explores what
competitor promotions can tell us about business models, market positioning,
and strategic priorities. And why, in a world where AI
makes competitive information increasingly accessible, collecting more
data does not necessarily lead to better decisions. Here's Sean.
Part 1, The Promotion That Started a Conversation.
Imagine this. You're the owner of a medical spa. It's Monday morning.
You're reviewing the previous week's performance when your marketing manager walks into your
office. Have you seen what the practice down the street is offering? She
shows you an advertisement. A popular injectable treatment,
significantly below your current price, and immediately the questions
begin. Are we too expensive? Will our patients go somewhere else?
Should we introduce a similar promotion? Should we lower our prices?
Now I want you to notice something. We haven't established anything about the
competitor's business yet. We don't know its margins. We don't know
its patient retention. We don't know whether this promotion is
successful. We don't even know whether the advertised price applies to
every customer. And yet we're already discussing discussing changing our own
prices. This is where I think many businesses make an avoidable
mistake. They start looking for a solution before they've established
what the problem actually is. And although I'm using a medical spa as
an example, the same situation occurs in consulting,
hospitality, professional services, fitness, and many other
industries. We see something happening in the market, we
interpret it as a threat, and then we feel compelled to respond. But
there's a difference between observing competitive activity and understanding
competitive behavior. And that difference is what I want to explore
today. What are we actually looking at? Let's return to our medical
spa. Suppose we examine the advertisement more closely.
The competitor is offering a much lower treatment price, but to qualify,
patients have to join a monthly membership program. Now things begin to
look a little different. That business may not be trying to win a price
war. It may be trying to create recurring revenue. It may be trying
to establish ongoing patient relationships. It may be trying
to improve retention or make future demand more predictable. The
advertised price is the attraction, but the membership may be the actual
business proposition. And that's a very different strategy from simply
being the cheapest provider. Does that make the membership model better?
Not necessarily. Does it mean the business is successful? We don't know.
But it changes the question we should be asking. Instead of asking,
should we match their price? We might ask, what kind of
customer relationship are they trying to create? And perhaps more
importantly, is that a relationship we want to create in our own business?
Because those 2 questions move us from reaction to strategy. The
5 signals behind a promotion. When we examine competitor
promotions, I think there are at least 5 different commercial objectives
worth considering. The first is customer acquisition.
An introductory offer may be designed primarily to get someone through the door.
The business may be willing to accept a lower margin on the first transaction
because it hopes to build a longer-term relationship. The second is
retention. Membership programs, loyalty benefits, and
preferential pricing can encourage customers to return. The third
is transaction value. Packages and bundled services may
encourage customers to purchase a more extensive engagement rather than one
isolated service. The fourth is capacity utilization.
A business offering discounts on particular days may be trying to fill
unused appointments or make better use of existing resources.
And the fifth is positioning. This one interests me particularly.
Some businesses compete through lower prices. Others emphasize
expertise, convenience, personalization, reliability, or the
experience surrounding their service. Consider 2 professional
consulting firms. One offers a discounted introductory assessment.
The other offers an initial strategic review at its normal fee, but
includes a more comprehensive evaluation and a detailed discussion with
senior management. On the surface, they may appear to be offering
similar services at different prices, but they may be competing
for entirely different client expectations. One may be
focused on lowering the barrier to the first engagement. The other may be
emphasizing the depth of its expertise and the value of its judgment.
So, once again, price alone tells us relatively little.
We need to understand the structure of the offer and the position the business
appears to be building. And I want to be careful with the language here.
These are possible explanations. Not verified motivations.
That's an important distinction, because competitive intelligence
becomes unreliable the moment we start treating our interpretations as
established facts. There is an important distinction emerging
here. A competitor's advertisement is observable evidence.
The business objective behind that advertisement is an interpretation.
And whether that activity should influence your own strategy is an entirely
separate decision. AI can make the first part easier.
It can help organize information, compare offers, and
identify recurring patterns. But identifying a pattern is
not the same as understanding its meaning. In the second part of today's
conversation, Sean examines how businesses can move from collecting
competitive information to making better strategic decisions.
Here's Jean. Part 2: When More Information
Doesn't Mean Better Intelligence. Let's introduce AI into
this conversation, because one of the things AI is changing is how
easily businesses can gather, organize, and compare information.
Not long ago, monitoring competitors might have involved
manually visiting their websites, subscribing to newsletters,
collecting advertisements, and keeping spreadsheets of what they were doing.
Today, AI-assisted systems can help with much of that work. They
can compare published offers. They can identify changes in website
content. They can categorize promotions. They can examine
patterns across multiple businesses and different periods, and
increasingly they can help us summarize what appears to be changing in a
competitive environment. That's genuinely useful.
But I think we should be very careful about what comes next, because there's a
temptation to assume that more information automatically produces
better intelligence. It doesn't. Information becomes
useful when we can interpret it within a meaningful context. Let me
give you an example. Suppose an AI-assisted monitoring system
examines 50 service businesses over 3 months. It
identifies that 12 have introduced membership-based offers.
That's an observation, a useful observation. But what does it mean?
Does it mean customers are increasingly demanding memberships? Does it
indicate that businesses are struggling to retain customers? Does
it reflect a broader shift toward recurring revenue models? Or is it
simply that several businesses have adopted similar promotional approaches?
We don't know yet. We may have identified a development worth
investigating, but we haven't established its causes or commercial
consequences. And if we immediately conclude that our own
business needs a membership program, we may be making a decision on the
basis of an incomplete interpretation. AI can accelerate the
collection of evidence. It can also accelerate the production of
conclusions that haven't been adequately examined. That is one of the
challenges I see for business leaders— not necessarily a shortage of
information, but a shortage of clear criteria for
deciding what information actually matters. When
competitors start looking alike. There's another
consideration here, something I've been thinking about increasingly as AI
tools become more widely available. Let's imagine that several
businesses operate in the same market. They use similar AI
systems to analyze competitors. They look at similar data, and they
ask similar questions. What offers are competitors promoting?
What pricing structures appear most frequently? What marketing
messages are gaining attention? Then they ask AI to recommend
how they should respond. What might happen? Well, one possibility is
that their strategies gradually become more alike. The same
promotional approaches, the same membership structures, the same marketing
language, the same attempts to differentiate themselves, which is
rather ironic, isn't it? They may all be trying to become more
competitive while collectively becoming less distinctive. I call this
risk convergence, and it's not something AI invented.
Businesses have been copying competitors for decades, but AI may
make the process faster and easier. When businesses use
similar information and similar analytical tools without bringing their own
judgment, purpose, and positioning into the decision, they risk arriving
at increasingly similar answers. And I think that's worth serious
consideration, because competitive intelligence should help you understand the
environment in which you operate; it should not automatically determine how
your business must behave. Knowing your position
before deciding your response. Let's return to the
original medical spa example. We now know that a nearby
competitor is offering discounted injectable treatments through a membership
program. Before making a decision, I would want to understand
3 things. First, what's happening in the market? Not just one
promotion, but the broader competitive picture. Are several
practices introducing memberships? Is this a sustained
development? Are offers becoming more aggressive, or are
practices shifting toward more personalized service propositions.
Second, where does our own business stand? What kind of patients do we
serve? Why do they choose us? What do they value? Are we
deliberately positioning ourselves as a premium, highly personalized
practice, or is accessibility and recurring treatment an important
part of our proposition? And third, what decision, if
any, does this new information actually require? Perhaps we need to
reconsider our membership model. Perhaps we need to communicate the value of
our services more clearly. Perhaps there is an opportunity to
introduce a different kind of package, or perhaps we should do absolutely
nothing, and I want to emphasize that last possibility.
Doing nothing is not necessarily a failure to respond. It can be a
deliberate strategic decision, provided that decision is based on an
understanding of the situation rather than indifference. For me,
this is the distinction between reacting to the market and maintaining a
strategic position within it. The Competitive
Intelligence Trap. There is a somewhat uncomfortable
question I'd like business leaders to consider. Are you
monitoring your competitors to understand the market?
Or are you monitoring them because you're uncertain about your own direction? Those are 2
different situations. If your strategy is unclear, every
competitor's action can begin to look important. Someone
introduces a discount. You consider a discount. Someone announces
a membership. You start discussing memberships. Someone changes the
language on their website. You wonder whether you should do the same.
Before long, the direction of your business is being shaped by a collection of
decisions made by other companies. And none of those companies
necessarily knows what is best for your business. This is why I think the
order of thinking matters so much. Understand the environment,
understand your position within it. Then decide what deserves your
attention. Not every signal is important, not every trend is
relevant, and not every competitor deserves a response.
Let me make this practical. The next time someone brings a competitor's
offer into a management meeting, don't begin by asking whether you should
match it. Start with 3 questions. What do we actually know?
Separate the observable facts from assumptions. What is being advertised,
under what conditions, for how long, to which customers? What might this
tell us about the competitor's strategy? Explore possible
explanations without immediately treating one as correct. Is the offer
about acquisition, retention, revenue predictability?
Capacity, positioning, and finally, does this change
anything that matters to our business? That may be the most important
question of all. Because even if we understand exactly what a
competitor is trying to do, it doesn't automatically follow that we
should do something similar. Our customers may be different, our
economics may be different, our strengths may be different,
and our strategic priorities may be different. A competitor's decision
is information. It is not an instruction.
Closing reflection. I want to leave you with one final thought. We often
talk about competitive intelligence as if its purpose is to tell us what our
competitors are doing, but I would argue that this is only the beginning.
The real purpose is to improve our understanding of the environment in which we
make decisions, and to help us determine whether that environment requires
us to reconsider anything about our own position. Technology
can help us observe more, AI can help us recognize patterns faster,
but neither observation nor pattern recognition removes the need for judgment.
A discount may be about price. It may be about acquiring
customers, keeping them longer, filling unused capacity, or creating a
different revenue model. And sometimes a discount is simply a discount.
The challenge is to understand the difference before deciding what to do.
So the next time you encounter an attractive offer from a competitor, I
invite you to ask a slightly different question. Not, how do we compete
with that price? But, what game are they actually playing, and is it a game
we should be playing at all? That's where competitive intelligence becomes
strategic intelligence, and that's where clarity becomes more valuable
than speed. I'm Jean Dorff. Thank you for listening.
Today's conversation reminds us that competitive activity is not
the same as competitive strategy. A discount, a
membership, or a promotional campaign can be easy to observe.
Understanding what it means and whether it matters to your own business
requires a different level of thinking. As AI makes market
information more accessible, that distinction becomes increasingly
important. You can find the accompanying article, Beyond the
Discount, and more perspectives on business strategy and AI at
jeandorffconsultancy.com. If this episode
prompted a useful question for your own leadership team, consider sharing it with a
colleague. I'm Nia. Thank you for listening to AI and the Boardroom.
You've been listening to AI and the Boardroom with Jean Dorff. AI is
changing how businesses compete, grow, and make decisions.
Strategy, leadership, and judgment remain essential to
deciding what deserves action and what should remain unchanged.
If this episode gave you a useful way to look at a decision, share it
with someone responsible for making one. You can find more in the show notes
or at schondorfconsultancy.com. What AI Changes, What
It Doesn't, What Leaders Need to Decide.