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For most of the software era, competitive advantage came from the product itself.

Build a better feature. Create a better workflow. Solve a problem more elegantly than everyone else.

That playbook worked because software was relatively difficult and expensive to build.

AI is changing that.

Today, features can be prototyped faster, copied faster, and improved faster than at any point in software history. Entire categories can move from innovation to parity in a matter of months.

That's creating a shift that many tech founders are only beginning to appreciate:

The moat is moving.

And increasingly, it lives outside the product.

Look at what has happened across AI-powered software over the past two years.

Meeting assistants, research tools, coding copilots, presentation generators, and customer support platforms have exploded in number. In many categories, dozens of products now offer remarkably similar capabilities because they're built on top of the same underlying foundation models.

The challenge isn't that the products are bad.

The challenge is that feature advantages don't stay unique for very long.

What feels differentiated today often becomes table stakes tomorrow.

As software becomes easier to build, software itself becomes a weaker source of long-term differentiation.

One company navigating this transition well is Cursor.

On the surface, Cursor is an AI-powered coding environment.

But the company's success isn't simply about having AI features. Many competitors have AI features.

Instead, Cursor has focused on becoming deeply embedded in developer workflows. It is building habits, community adoption, and strong word-of-mouth among technical users.

That's important because developers don't just adopt tools. They build routines around them.

And routines are much harder to replace than features.

Another example is Shopify.

Competing ecommerce platforms have existed for years, and many offer similar functionality.

Yet Shopify has continued to grow because its value extends beyond storefront software.

The company built:

A competitor can copy features.

Replicating an ecosystem is much harder.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI era may be companies with unique data.

Most software companies can access similar models.

Far fewer possess years of proprietary customer behavior, workflow, transaction, or industry-specific information.

Consider Bloomberg.

The company has survived several innovation-fueled technology shifts that initially seemed like existential threats to its existence, like the Internet and mobile. And the latest threat is AI. But if history serves as any guide, Bloomberg is up to the challenge.

Because the company's long-term value isn't merely the software or its interface.

It's the vast amount of proprietary financial data and intelligence embedded within the platform.

AI can help analyze that information.

But it can't easily recreate it.

In many markets, the data itself is becoming the moat.

If you're building software today, the question is no longer:

"How do I build a feature nobody else has?"

The more useful question may be:

"What can I uniquely own or gets stronger as more customers use it?"

That's where durable advantages increasingly live.

Examples include:

Can you reach customers more efficiently than competitors?

Does usage create unique insights or proprietary assets?

Does the product become more valuable as adoption grows?

Do integrations, partners, creators, or developers make the product harder to leave?

When multiple products appear similar, are customers more likely to think of you first?

AI is making software more powerful.

It's also making software more replaceable.

That doesn't mean product innovation no longer matters.

It means product innovation alone may no longer be enough.

As features become easier to build and faster to copy, the winners will increasingly be the companies that own something deeper:

Distribution.

Data.

Community.

Habit.

Trust.

Because in the AI era, the most valuable part of a software business may no longer be the software.

Best,

Edwin