There is a quiet competition happening right now in every industry, in every market, across every continent. It is not loud. It does not announce itself. But it is real, and it is accelerating — and the businesses that are not paying attention today will be spending the next five years trying to catch up. The race is not about who buys the most AI tools. It is about who builds the most intelligent business model. I have spent the last two years researching AI adoption across small and medium enterprises as part of my MBA research at Riphah International University. What I found challenges most of the assumptions business owners have about what AI actually is, and what it actually does.

The Data Is Uncomfortable

According to the State Bank of Pakistan’s SME Finance Review(2023), approximately 90 percent of all businesses in Pakistan are classified as small or medium enterprises, contributing nearly 40 percent of national GDP. Yet the overwhelming majority of these firms continue to operate through manual systems, paper-based records, and reactive decision-making. The same pattern, at varying degrees, exists globally across developing and developed markets alike. McKinsey’s Global AI Survey consistently finds that while AI awareness among business leaders is near universal, meaningful integration into core business strategy remains the exception rather than the rule. Most firms that “adopt AI” are doing one of two things: automating a single process to reduce labour cost, or deploying a consumer-facing chatbot to handle basic customer service. Both are useful. Neither is transformative.

The Real Gap Is Strategic, Not Technological

Here is what the research reveals: the businesses gaining durable competitive advantage from AI are not the ones with the most
sophisticated tools. They are the ones that used AI as a trigger to rethink how they create and deliver value — their entire business model. Jay Barney’s resource-based view of the firm, one of the foundational frameworks in strategic management, argues that sustainable competitive advantage comes from resources that are valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable. A chatbot you purchased from a vendor is none of those things. But the customer behavioural data you accumulate over three years of consistent AI usage — and the predictive capability that data enables — is all four. This is the gap most businesses are missing. They are buying AI. They are not building AI-enabled business models.

Where Project Management and Design Come In

This is where my work intersects with the problem directly. As a certified project manager, I have seen repeatedly that technology
initiatives fail not because the technology is wrong, but because the implementation is unstructured. There are no milestones. There is no change management. There is no performance baseline established before deployment so you can measure what actually changed. And as a designer, I have seen the other failure mode: businesses that adopt AI in their back-end operations but never update how they communicate their value to customers. Their brand, their visual identity, their customer touchpoints — all still positioned for a pre-AI market that no longer exists. The businesses winning this race are the ones who approach AI transformation the way any serious project deserves to be approached: with a plan, with structure, and with a brand that signals the new capability they have built.

The Question You Should Be Asking

Most business owners ask: “Which AI tool should I buy?” The more important question is: “If I adopt AI, how does it
change what I offer, who I serve, and how I charge for it?” That question is a business model question. And answering it well is the difference between spending money on software and building a structural competitive advantage. The race is already underway. The firms that understand this distinction will win it.

Point to Ponder: If every one of your competitors adopted the exact same AI tool you are using today, would your business still have an advantage — and if so, where does that advantage actually come from?