AI isn't replacing great leaders. It's changing where they create value.

I've led businesses in commercial finance, marketplaces, ecommerce, subscription media, and consumer products — industries that look nothing alike on the surface. Twenty-five years moving among them has convinced me of something counterintuitive: companies overestimate how unique they are, and underestimate how fast competitive advantage migrates.

That's why the current conversation about AI interests me less for what it says about automation than for what it implies about advantage. Most discussions start with which jobs AI eliminates. A fair question, but I suspect a secondary one. The more interesting question: if AI makes execution dramatically easier, where does competitive advantage go next? I don't think it disappears. I think it moves, and it's taking where executives create value with it.

For decades, tech companies followed a predictable model: solve a real problem, reach product-market fit first, and you had years to scale before anyone caught up. That window is closing. Software has never been easier to build or reverse-engineer, with public data, reviews, and AI-assisted development making a competitor's playbook cheap to copy. Rocket Internet proved a version of this well before generative AI, cloning successful internet businesses and winning on execution alone. AI doesn't create that dynamic; it accelerates it. Once a market validates an idea, the contest shifts from who invented it to who executes it better — and the advantage that used to live inside the product migrates to everything around it: brand, because trust decides when products succeed; customer success, because retention is harder than acquisition; pricing, CRM, distribution, and community, because none of it is as easy to copy as a feature set.

I saw a version of this at Zappos years ago. Most calls into our service center weren't complaints, they were people asking questions before they'd even bought anything. You can't try on shoes online, so the real barrier to a sale was the buyer's uncertainty, not the product. Zappos treated that as an operational problem: reps trained to talk someone through a decision, backed by a return policy generous enough that saying yes felt risk-free. Nobody remembers Zappos for the best shoes. They remember it for making it safe to buy shoes you'd never touched, an insight that came from someone curious enough to ask why the phone kept ringing, not from a model.

Some read AI's rise as proof that marketing and sales matter less, since it automates so much of what those functions do. I think it's the opposite: as products get easier to copy, the organizations responsible for earning trust and keeping customers matter more, not less. What distinguished a great CMO or CRO a decade ago — demand gen, enterprise CRM, attribution, marketing automation — required expertise few leaders had. Software (Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe, and a wave of AI-native challengers) is making that expertise available to everyone, which doesn't make great executives less valuable, it changes what makes them exceptional. Leadership migrates toward the decisions software still can't make: which markets deserve investment, how to position against identical claims, and how to build an organization that learns faster than its rivals.

The Disease of Uniqueness

One lesson has followed me from eBay to Craftsy and beyond — I've come to call it the Disease of Uniqueness. Every company believes it's fundamentally different: our customers don't behave like anyone else's, our buying cycle is unique, our industry doesn't work that way. Sometimes that's true. More often it's only partially true.

Strip away the jargon and the org chart, and most successful businesses wrestle with the same handful of questions: Can we articulate a compelling value proposition? Can we find and affordably reach the right customer? Can we retain them long enough to build durable economics? And can we adapt faster than the market around us? The answers vary by industry. The questions don't. Executives convinced their business is one-of-a-kind become prisoners of their own category, benchmarking the same competitors and recycling the same ideas.

The most effective leaders I've worked with did the opposite. They knew their own business deeply but constantly borrowed ideas from elsewhere, asking not "who else sells quilting classes?" but "who has solved a similar customer problem?" As CEO of Craftsy, we once hired a data scientist who'd previously worked on the Human Genome Project. An odd fit, since genetics has little obvious to do with quilting. But the frameworks he used to find relationships across billions of genetic data points turned out to be remarkably good at predicting what a quilter would buy next. After that, I stopped asking candidates whether they'd spent ten years in my industry and started asking whether they'd repeatedly solved hard problems and learned faster than the people around them.

AI accelerates that shift. Factual knowledge is becoming less scarce — every executive now has the same research tools and copilots. What's scarce is the ability to connect ideas that don't obviously belong together. That's the skill I've started evaluating differently in how we evaluate candidates.

Rethinking the Executive Interview

That shift changes how executive interviews should work. One of the first things I'd retire is the classic closing question: "Do you have any questions for me?" We've all sat through forty-five minutes of the interviewer asking questions, then a reversal for the final few. I used to think that was a formality. Now I think it's exactly backwards.

The best candidates don't wait until the end to get curious — they're testing hypotheses from the moment they sit down, arriving with a point of view, sharing it early, and refining it as new information comes in. By the end, you're no longer conducting an assessment. You're watching two executives work through a business problem together.

A decade ago, arriving underprepared was excusable — research was slow and expensive. Not anymore. Anyone genuinely curious can spend an hour with AI, annual reports, and competitor sites and walk in with a well-informed hypothesis. I don't expect them to be right; no outsider can diagnose a company's internal challenges in a few hours. What I care about is whether they cared enough to prepare, developed a real point of view, and were humble enough to change it as new information emerged. AI has made curiosity observable: candidates can no longer hide behind not having enough information.

I once interviewed a marketing candidate more as a courtesy than out of real expectation. After introductions, she said, "I love the business, and I've been thinking about it, can I use the whiteboard?" What followed looked like a scene out of A Beautiful Mind: customer segments, marketing channels, conversion funnels, and sharp questions about perceived value versus price. She was wrong about some of it and right about the rest, and that was exactly the point, I didn't need her to be right, I needed her to be thinking. Two hours later, I made her an offer on the spot.

The day before, I'd interviewed a candidate with an immaculate résumé, big name companies, undergrad, MBA, pedigree all the way down….who seemed to know and care little about the actual business. "The agency handled that," he said more than once, and spent more time asking about our policy on double-trigger stock option agreements than about our customers.

That contrast has reshaped how we assess executives at RevelOne. Experience and track record still matter, but we now weigh them against something harder to see on a résumé: how someone thinks. Can they synthesize marketing, product, sales, finance, and customer success into one coherent strategy? Do they borrow ideas from adjacent industries, or stay boxed in by their own? None of that replaces experience, it's the force multiplier that determines whether experience stays relevant, because as AI automates more of execution, functional expertise becomes the price of admission, not the differentiator.

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I didn't set out to write about artificial intelligence. I ended up writing about where competitive advantage goes once it stops living inside the product, and that turns out to be mostly a story about leadership. AI is accelerating a shift already underway: products easier to build, information easier to access, execution easier to automate. None of that makes great executives less valuable. It changes where their value comes from: toward judgment, curiosity, and the ability to connect ideas that don't obviously belong together. The companies that win the next decade won't simply be the ones that adopt AI fastest. They'll be the ones led by executives who keep asking better questions long after everyone else assumes they have the answers.

About RevelOne

RevelOne is a specialized go-to-market search & advisory partner that drives Growth through People. Growth strategy and talent strategy are completely intertwined, yet often handled by different people. We staff searches with both an experienced recruiter and an operating partner to support our clients in sharpening their growth plans and ensuring they have the right full-time and part-time talent to achieve their specific goals.  

Over the past 10 years, we’ve successfully placed 2,000 people at over 750 clients, including both tech companies and traditional companies looking for modern GTM leaders. Over 50 of these clients are now unicorns.

Our GTM retained search practice focuses on Marketing, Sales, Client Success, and Partnerships/BD permanent hires for all levels, from executives to directors, managers, and team buildouts. We can also source temporary hires – pre-vetted GTM experts – for strategy and execution on interim, part-time, or project-based engagements.

Contact: Have a GTM question, a new hire, or a problem you’d like to solve? Reach out to RevelOne today to discuss: jlevisay@revel-one.com