ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI GENERATED IMAGE
AI is only as good as the expertise behind it.
The moat isn’ t technical. It’ s experiential.
In the startup world, people talk about“ moats”— competitive advantages that protect your business from being easily copied. For decades, the assumed moat in software was technical complexity. If your code was hard to build, it was hard to replicate.
That moat is evaporating. AI has made it possible for a solo operator to produce software that would have required a team of developers just a few years ago. The technical barrier is no longer the barrier.
The new moat is knowledge. The new moat is the thing you know about your industry, your customers and your craft that took you years to accumulate. That is what’ s hard to replicate. That is what makes your product, your service or your AI-powered tool meaningfully different from what anyone else could build.
A generic AI chatbot can’ t even look up a part number accurately— and if you’ ve ever tried, you already know that. It’ s that exact problem that drives people like me to build something better. But building something better requires decades of hands-on diagnostic experience— the kind that knows to ask whether the engine surges under load or only at idle, that catches the detail about the customer running non-ethanol fuel and that arrives at the correct answer without sending your service writer on a wild goose chase. The AI is only as good as the expertise behind it.
Save your money. Ask the model.
While we’ re on the subject of things people have backwards, let’ s talk about AI integration firms. There’ s an entire industry springing up right now built around the promise of helping businesses“ adopt AI.” They’ ll charge you tens of thousands of dollars to hold your hand through a process that, at its core, amounts to asking questions and getting answers, which is exactly what the AI itself does, for free or close to it.
22 OPE + May 2026 www. OPE-Plus. com