With A Straight Bat

I’ve been watching a category slowly collapse and nobody is naming what’s actually happening.

There is a type of company that built its entire market position on the fact that buyers didn’t know any better. You know the type. Product was fine, never great. The brand filled the gap between fine and great with conference sponsorships, analyst relationships, and a sales team trained to reach the prospect before they could do real research.

That company is now in serious trouble and the reason is simpler than people want to admit.

Your buyer’s first move in 2026 is not Google. It is not your website. It is not a peer recommendation. It is asking an AI assistant to map the landscape and surface every alternative, including the open source options and the smaller players with better fit that your buyer would never have found on their own two years ago.

The information asymmetry that propped up entire market positions is not eroding. It is already gone.

I am watching this unfold across at least three enterprise categories I am close to and the pattern repeats every time. AI discovery surfaces alternatives. The incumbent’s pricing looks indefensible next to transparent competitors. The old “safe choice” narrative falls apart because AI does not carry a status quo bias.

So the uncomfortable question for every CMO is this. Is your brand built on genuine differentiation or on your buyer’s historical inability to find something better?

If it is the latter, you are not facing a competitive threat. You are watching an extinction event in slow motion. And the first major casualty probably will not make headlines. It will just be a pipeline that quietly evaporated, deal by deal, while leadership kept reviewing last quarter’s deck.

The response to this is simple but it requires honesty. Every CMO should be auditing their positioning against one test. If an AI agent were advising your buyer today with full access to the market, would your product still win on substance? Where the answer is yes, double down. Where the answer is no, fix the product before you fix the messaging. Because in a world where the buyer sees everything, the only brand strategy that survives is being genuinely better.

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