The Selection Economy™ #13: The New Competitive Advantage
Every company is asking how to use AI. That's not the most important question — being understood is the advantage that's much harder to copy.
Read the essay →Essays on positioning, discovery and the systems that make a business the obvious choice. Originally published in The Selection Economy™.
Every company is asking how to use AI. That's not the most important question — being understood is the advantage that's much harder to copy.
Read the essay →AI can read your website and summarize your expertise. It can't measure integrity, resilience, or character — and those still decide who gets trusted.
Read the essay →Almost every founder answers 'what do you do?' with 'well, it's a little complicated.' That complexity has a hidden cost now that AI does the first round of evaluation.
Read the essay →AI is forming an opinion about your company before anyone lands on your homepage. Your website hasn't disappeared — its job has changed.
Read the essay →A conversation with executive speaking coach John Bates confirms a thesis: AI doesn't invent authority, it surfaces the authority you've already built — clearly and consistently.
Read the essay →Choosing a boutique hotel in Paris with ChatGPT instead of forty browser tabs — and the realization that AI can narrow the field, but the friendship that made the trip worth taking was built the old-fashioned way.
Read the essay →A story about showing up unprepared for an avalanche course — and what it reveals about founder-led businesses arriving at a new trailhead carrying equipment built for the last mountain.
Read the essay →After selling a company, a stretch of job applications disappearing into ATS systems taught the first lesson in something bigger: what it feels like to be filtered before another human ever knows you exist.
Read the essay →AI is transforming research, not just search — and that makes unambiguous meaning the most valuable thing a company can offer.
Read the essay →AI can't recommend the company you've become — only the company it can see. On the growing cost of the gap between your best thinking and your digital record.
Read the essay →The old CMO made the brand. The new CMO also has to earn its place in AI outputs — and earning that placement works like PR, not advertising.
Read the essay →A real before-and-after: an AI visibility report for a client confirmed that businesses can materially improve their AI discoverability — the work is specific and the results are measurable.
Read the essay →For twenty-five years the internet has rewarded search. Now buyers are asking instead of searching — and AI is becoming the system that selects who gets recommended.
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