บทถอดความฉบับเต็มของ How AI Is Commoditising Cybersecurity Businesses

advice isn't wrong. But watch what happens when an entire market gets the same advice. Every cyber firm starts pivoting to AI governance. Every proposal suddenly mentions board level risk strategy. Every homepage gets an update. And within about 18 months, AI governance will be a new commodity. Because when everyone is zigging, the zig becomes the crowd. Now, 40 years ago, Al Reese and Jack Trout wrote, You win. By owning a position in the buyer's mind that nobody else can claim. A position so specific that when the right buyer shows up, there's only one obvious company to call. And the idea, this idea, it's older than the internet. And it's never been more important than right now because the buyer's AI is doing something very specific when it reads your proposal. It's looking for a signal, something to say about you that it can't say about everyone else, a reason to distinguish you. If your positioning gives it nothing to work with, it's going to default back to price. And if the buyer follows, there's actually a name for why this is happening in human decision making. Psychologists call it cognitive ease. When options look similar, the brain defaults to the simplest available comparison, and the simplest available comparison is the number at the bottom of the page. The AI runs the same logic, just faster and without giving a shit who gets the deal. So the question you need to answer is: what does your positioning give the buyer's AI to say about you? And maybe you're wondering, well, how do I know what I've got is a real position or just a polished version of what everybody else is saying? I use this one test with every founder that I work with. I call it the copy test. It's one question. Could a competitor Copy it today. Run it across everything that you claim makes you different. Your tools, are they copyable? Any firm or company with a budget in an afternoon can add the same stack because they can code it with AI and use GitHub or Lovable or something else to get it out there live. Your process, the way that you run your client engagements, your methodology, mostly copyable. Takes a bit longer, but AI is closing that gap fast. What took a year to build a few years ago can be reverse engineer in days now. So Coca-Cola can become Pepsi, right? And your position, the specific buyer that you serve, the specific problem that you're known for solving, the outcome you've become the obvious choice for. That's the thing that can't be copied as quickly. Because a position, it's not a product feature. It's a decision about who you're for. Plus a reputation you've earned in one particular space. And nobody can buy that off a shelf, try as they might. So whatever survives that test, whatever a competitor genuinely can beg, borrow, or steal, no matter how hard they try, that's the thing worth building everything around. And the reason it works against AI commoditization specifically is this. When your positioning is specific enough, the buyer's AI has something to say back to the buyer about you. It can tell the buyer why you, not just That you're also a cybersecurity consultancy with great credentials. The specificity does the work the AI needs to do its job when you want its job to be choosing you. Let me show you what this looks like in practice. Imagine two cybersecurity firms: same size, same experience, equally good at delivering work to a high standard. The first is gonna describe itself as a cybersecurity consultancy that helps businesses stay protected across their digital infrastructure. And the second describes itself as the firm that helps private equity-backed businesses identify and resolve the security issues that kill acquisition deals. Now imagine a buyer feeds both of those into their AI and asks it to compare. The first company is gonna get sorted into a category with a hundred others. The AI has nothing specific to say about them, so it describes them in the same language it'd use to describe any competent company in the space. Whereas the second firm is different. The buyer who's just had an acquisition slow down because of some security red flag is gonna read that and think, that's exactly what happened to us. That's the company we need. So one firm is on the spreadsheet being sorted by price. The other one doesn't even nearly make it to the spreadsheet because there's zero comparison. It's so specific to the problem that they want solved, and they're so specialized in it that that's why there is zero comparison. And this is what I mean when I say specificity is the mechanism. Broad positioning produces broad results. Specifically Positioning produces recognition, and recognition is what drives the kind of commercial outcome that isn't a race to the bottom in terms of price, even when AI is in play. So here's the move most founders make instead. And I say this with no judgment because I see it constantly in all sectors. When people feel the pressure and proposals aren't closing at the same speed that they used to, the lower day rate that probably felt right a couple of years ago suddenly gets moved back. Or get switched back on. And the instinct is to respond as well by discounting your current pricing or that pricing, worse again, and adding even more services to try and increase the value and decrease the cost. Then people are going and they're getting these extra credentials. So you end up with a broader offer. So there's something for everyone. And it feels like it makes commercial sense in that moment. You're trying to reduce the risk of losing a deal by covering more ground. But watch what it does to your positioning. Every new service you add makes you harder to describe, every expansion of scope makes you easier to compare to a bigger list of competitors. And every new credential is one more thing that sounds like it could appear on any company's website. And every time you lower or discount your price, you are literally in that race to the bottom. You're gonna get busier, more interchangeable, and work harder for less. It should be the other way around. The founders who break out of it and go in the opposite direction, they get specific about one thing. They pick who is their ideal buyer. They pick the problem and the outcome that they want to be known for, and they say that clearly, absolutely frickin' everywhere. So that when the right buyer shows up, the AI has something to say about them and the human has something to remember. And the question of why you isn't even a question anymore. So two common pitballs that I watch people fall into around this: one is competing on speed and price. You will lose. The only way to win that race is to care less about the work. Than the person you're raising and you don't, you you care. So don't run that race. And two is following the herds pivot and calling it differentiation. If the whole market is moving to AI governance this year and you move with it, you've zigged with everyone else, run it through the copy test. Could a competitor copy your AI governance offer by next week? And if it's a yes, it doesn't count. If you're watching this and you genuinely can't tell whether your positioning gives a buyer's AI something specific to say about you, that's worth knowing for certain. I built a strategic positioning tool for exactly this. It takes about 10 minutes, it's free. The link's in the description and it gives you a 90 day action plan. For how to lean into your differentiator. So go and find out how you can better stand out. It's called find your zag. So when everybody else is zigging, you're zagging. So here's what I want you to take away. Your expertise is still worth a fortune. What changed is that sameness now buries it. And AI has turned that from a slow problem into a fast one. If a buyer can swap you out for someone or something else, sooner or later they will swap you out for someone or something cheaper. And that's the risk in one sentence right there. And the way through it is a position specific enough that swapping you out stops being something a buyer or their AI would even think is up for consideration. So when you get that right, your whole picture changes completely. Buyers are going to arrive already half-sold because they came looking for exactly what you do. Your pipeline is going to stop depending on who referred you last month, and you get the thing that you've actually wanted this whole time. Revenue that you can plan around, buyers who trust you before the first conversation. A business that keeps running when you step back from it. So think back to that buyer at the start, the one with three proposals open and paste them into Chat GPT. You can't stop them doing that. That's just how buying works now. What you can decide is whether the AI has something unique to say about you or whether it files you in with everybody else and sorts you by price. So go and find your ZAG and then own it like nobody else can.