Causal ambiguity
Advantage that even the company holding it cannot fully explain. AI copies the explicit and cannot copy the ambiguous, so this is where advantage now lives.
Strategists have a term for competitive advantage that resists explanation: causal ambiguity. The company succeeding cannot fully say why it succeeds, which means a competitor cannot fully copy it either. It is the tacit part, the way people, process and relationship fit together in one account and would not fit the same way in another.
AI is brilliant at copying the explicit and useless at copying the ambiguous. It can read your product sheet, your price list and your website and reproduce all three by lunchtime. It cannot reproduce the fact that your service engineer has the plant manager’s mobile number. So AI does not erase competitive advantage. It relocates it, out of the product and into the five non-price elements of the offer, which is where the 7-P Offer Navigator sends you to manufacture more of it.
Set out in full in: Creating Customer Value Propositions with AI (Kogan Page, 2027), Introduction and chapters 2, 3 and 7.
Related terms
The 7-P Offer Navigator
The marketing mix repurposed as the anatomy of an offer. Product and price are the shop window; the other five are the workshop, and the hardest to copy.
The offer
Everything a supplier does for a customer: products, services, prices, people, processes and proof. Not what the customer gets, but how they get it.
The commodity trap
The gravity in business markets that pulls every offer towards sameness. AI has made it stronger by stripping the scarcity out of capability.
See the method run on one real account in three days: the One Page Proposition.