Your Customers Meet AI Before They Meet You
For most of the internet era, competitive advantage came from getting closer to the customer: surveys, reviews, usage data, direct conversation. A new HBR piece by Graham Kenny and Ganna Pogrebna argues
that ground is shifting under that whole model. Increasingly, the first “conversation” a prospective customer has isn’t with your sales team or your website. It’s with an AI tool that researches, evaluates, and shortlists suppliers on their behalf, often before a human at your company knows the prospect exists.