Staying close to customers beats having the newest tech, says one founder

A founder writing in Entrepreneur has a simple answer to the question of who wins when technology shifts, including the current AI wave. His view: it is not the company with the newest software. It is the one that stays close enough to customers to notice when their problem changes, then keeps building to solve it. The piece is an opinion column, and the views are the author's own.

The common story, and the author's pushback

The popular storyline goes like this. Older software companies are bolting a chatbot onto a 10-year-old product. New startups built around AI from day one. So the older companies must be losing ground. The author says many established companies are thriving in the AI era anyway. He has watched three tech shifts, from web to mobile, then cloud, now AI. In each, some older firms thrived and some faded. Some startups redefined their field, and some were caught off guard by the older players.

How a customer's problem drifts

He gives an example: a cloud-based accounting program for small businesses. It lets an owner track transactions, send invoices and close the books accurately. For years, that was enough. Over time, the real problem changed. The books were accurate, but closing them still took hours of repetitive work that crowded out more strategic financial tasks.

If the company decides efficiency is not its job, the author says it will rarely be hit by one dramatic blow. Rivals win piece by piece. One startup builds a tool for revenue recognition, which is how a business records income. Another builds a forecasting tool. Eventually customers ask why they still pay for the original product.

What the author recommends

• Track how the customer's problem has changed, not just the next feature to build.
• Learn the history of that problem: where it was 10 years ago, and how it has changed since.
• Stop asking customers what else you can build. They feel frustration before they can name the fix.
• Build in modular pieces so new capabilities can be added without a multi-year rebuild.
• Keep founders involved in product strategy, even after hiring a head of product.

He argues that a list of planned features is not the same as a product strategy. He also says nobody at many growing companies owns the question of whether the job customers hired the product to do three years ago is still the job they need done.

What to keep in mind

The column rests on the author's own experience, not on data, and the text provided does not include the specific questions he suggests asking customers. Still, the test is easy to try. A business owner can ask whether customers are still buying the same outcome they were buying a few years ago. The author's closing point is blunt: a startup becomes an incumbent, in the AI era, almost immediately.