If everyone can rent intelligence, where is your moat?

If your competitors can rent the same intelligence, what still gives people a reason to choose you?

Jack Dorsey posted four words this weekend: “there is no moat.” I think that captures something important about access to AI. But access to the same intelligence doesn’t mean companies become interchangeable. It makes the question of what distinguishes them more interesting.

In earlier posts, I’ve asked what companies should rent and what they need to own. This pushes that question one level deeper. If a competitor can buy the same models and tools, where does a lasting advantage come from? I keep coming back to three things: trust, distribution, and context that only your company holds.

Trust is built through what happens over time. Do people believe you? Do they come back? Do they expect you to take responsibility when something goes wrong? In media, I see how that relationship extends well beyond any single story. AI can make content easier to produce. It doesn’t automatically give people a reason to believe it, or to care who produced it.

Distribution is the ability to reach those people again. An audience on someone else’s platform is valuable, but the platform gets a vote in whether you can reach it tomorrow. A direct relationship with people who have chosen to hear from you is a different kind of asset. A competitor can buy the same software. It can’t buy that relationship nearly as easily.

Context is what your company has learned by doing the work. What customers care about, why a decision was made, when the usual process doesn’t apply, and which exceptions matter. Having that history isn’t enough on its own. The advantage comes from being able to use it to make better decisions, serve people better, and learn from what happens next. That’s where I think AI can make something distinctive about a company more valuable.

A reply to Jack’s post raised another possibility: as AI fills more of what we read and watch, people may want real human connection even more. I think that belongs in this discussion too. Knowing who is behind a business, whose judgment you’re relying on, and who will answer when something goes wrong may become more important as the technology becomes more capable.

There will obviously be plenty worth buying. A better model or a useful tool can make a real difference, and how well you put it to work matters. But I’d be careful about confusing access to a capability with an advantage competitors can’t easily reproduce. The more useful question is what you’re building with it that becomes harder to copy over time.

None of these assets is permanent. Trust can be lost, access to an audience can disappear, and years of knowledge can remain buried in systems nobody uses. So a CEO or board should be asking: Why do people trust us? Can we reach them without someone else’s permission? What have we learned that a competitor can’t get by buying the same tools? And is our investment in AI making any of those advantages stronger?

The model may be something you rent. The reason people choose you is something you have to keep earning.