28-04-2025
How Companies Can Turn AI Disruption Into Competitive Advantage
Embracing disruption as a key to success
Ivan Bofarull is Chief Innovation Officer at Esade and book author of 'Moonshot Thinking'
We are undeniably facing a transformative era driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI), with profound implications for companies. In its latest 'Request for Startups', Y Combinator — the Silicon Valley accelerator — emphasized a focus on 'startups building tools that allow small businesses to operate at the level of large corporations'. Meanwhile, Ark Invest's Cathie Wood predicts an 'epochal shift' in organizational performance due to AI-driven automation.
We are no longer dealing with episodic disruption; we are entering an era where disruption becomes a continuous process, orchestrated by autonomous AI agents. Imagine business strategy evolving as rapidly as high-frequency algorithmic trading in financial markets, with companies constantly playing catch-up. In light of this scenario, are organizations truly ready to navigate a business environment defined by constant disruption?
Despite decades of literature on disruptive innovation, many companies still struggle to react effectively to it. This ongoing challenge persists due to several factors:
Drawing on 30 years of corporate longevity research, a comparative analysis reveals three consistent traits among companies that thrive amid different waves of disruption:
In an AI-driven economy, companies must go beyond merely reacting to disruption. They need to become disruption-friendly organizations, capable of turning uncertainty into a strategic advantage. Building on these findings, companies in the AI era should master at least three core mechanisms:
In a world of endless disruption, companies must develop a curated portfolio of strategic bets, what I call Selective Optionality. This is where the role of a strategic scout becomes critical.
Many organizations fail to adapt to disruption because they have rigid strategic plans that quickly become obsolete. Instead, they need directionality—a flexible but clear trajectory that allows for adaptive course correction.
To build asymmetric capabilities is to create differentiation that AI alone cannot replicate. One of the most pressing debates today is how AI influences human decision-making, and whether it reinforces conventional wisdom or enables truly original insights. This is a crucial discussion, as corporate history is littered with companies that did what seemed right, aligning with industry's best practices and data-driven consensus, only to fail or stagnate. As Ray Dalio famously noted, success often requires betting against consensus and being right. The true upside lies in contrarian positions that prove correct.
However, AI's fundamental design is to extrapolate from past data, reinforcing prevailing patterns rather than generating truly novel insights. Even when prompted to be "contrarian," AI remains predictably contrarian, mimicking known counterarguments rather than crafting genuinely asymmetric beliefs.
The AI era does not need managers who simply follow benchmarks or industry norms. Instead, it demands leaders who:
Asymmetric beliefs fuel exponential improvements, and these breakthroughs create defensible competitive moats. This is because a high-risk technological leap, if successful, often reduces market risk, accelerating adoption at scale.
In the context of AI-driven transformation, a clear takeaway emerges: companies that succeed will be those that:
Moats may be eroding in an era of hyper-competition, but AI is also creating new windows of opportunity, ones that are deeply rooted in human ingenuity, not machine-driven predictability.
