Should I Pivot to AI or Double Down on My Domain?

Let me say something that will be unpopular in this moment: most AI pivots are not pivots at all. They are rebranding. A company that was losing to competitors in its original market does not become a winner by adding the word "AI" to its product description. It becomes a company that is still losing, now with a different explanation for why it hasn't found product-market fit.

The question you are actually facing is not "should I use AI?" The question is "what is the insight that this product is built on, and does AI change that insight?" If your insight was that users in a particular domain are underserved by existing tools — that the tools are clunky, incomplete, or built for a different user — then AI is potentially relevant only if it makes that insight more actionable. If you have a deep understanding of healthcare claims processing, and AI makes it possible to automate something that previously required humans, then AI is a legitimate extension of your domain expertise. The insight remains the same; the capability has expanded.

But if your insight was thin to begin with — if you were building a product on the hope that users would want it rather than on genuine understanding of what they needed — then AI will not rescue that product. It will add cost and complexity to an already uncertain bet.

The companies I admired most, and the products I am proudest of, were built on an obsessive understanding of a specific user and a specific problem. The technology was always in service of that understanding, never a substitute for it. AI is a powerful tool. It is not a strategy. If you cannot articulate, specifically, what AI allows you to do for your user that you could not do before, and why that matters, then you are not pivoting to AI. You are pivoting away from hard thinking.

Jobs is correct that AI is not a strategy. But he has not addressed the most important empirical question: is the platform shift real, and does it change the competitive structure of your market?

When I began working with radioactivity, many physicists treated it as an interesting phenomenon rather than a fundamental revision of how matter worked. The ones who were correct understood, from the evidence, that radioactivity was not an incremental improvement — it was a change in the underlying mechanism. The implications were not immediately obvious, but the evidence demanded that we take it seriously as a foundational shift.

The question for founders in 2026 is whether AI represents a similar foundational shift in their market, or whether it is an incremental improvement to existing capabilities. In some markets — legal document review, software development, customer support — the evidence is now clear that AI changes the cost structure and capability ceiling so dramatically that companies without AI will lose to companies with AI, regardless of domain expertise. In these markets, "double down on domain" is not a viable strategy, because domain expertise without AI leverage is now being outcompeted.

In other markets — physical products, regulated industries with narrow AI applications, complex interpersonal services — the evidence for a structural shift is much weaker. AI may be useful at the margin, but the fundamental competitive advantage remains human expertise, relationships, and regulatory positioning.

Before you answer this question, do the work: what is the actual evidence that AI changes the competitive dynamics in your specific market? Not the general narrative — the specific evidence. Talk to the customers who are most likely to switch to an AI-native competitor. Measure whether AI tools in your category are improving at a rate that will make your current product obsolete. Only then can you answer this question with intellectual honesty.

Both colleagues are analyzing the technology question. I want to analyze the power question.

A technology wave does not just create new products. It redistributes power. The AI wave is redistributing power along a specific axis: the axis of capital and engineering talent. The companies and teams that have access to compute, to AI research talent, and to large-scale training data are accumulating advantages that were not available in the previous era. The companies and teams that lack these resources are facing a new kind of competition from adversaries they could not have predicted.

The strategic question is not "should I use AI?" It is "what is my position relative to the new power structure this wave is creating, and how do I preserve or improve that position?"

If you have deep domain expertise — relationships with enterprise customers, regulatory knowledge, process insight that took years to accumulate — you have a defensive position that the AI-native competitors lack. They have the technology but not the domain. You have the domain but may lack the technology. The question is whether your domain moat is wide enough and deep enough to withstand competitors who will learn the domain faster with AI assistance than they could have learned it before.

My counsel: the decision to pivot or double down is ultimately a question about timing and terrain. If your domain moat is eroding — if the AI-native competitors are already in your market, learning quickly, and winning customers — then doubling down is a defensive choice made from weakness. If your domain moat is still strong — if your customers are sticky, if the competitive threat is still theoretical rather than manifest — then doubling down while carefully integrating AI is the move that preserves power.

Do not pivot away from strength. Do not cling to a position that is already being overrun.