Kishore Jayaram, Chief Transformation Officer at Kinetic IT 
Organisations should start viewing frontier AI as a perishable commodity rather than a permanent source of competitive advantage.
What’s considered state-of-the-art today won’t remain the benchmark for long, while access to frontier capability is becoming increasingly available through a growing number of providers.
For most organisations, sustainable advantage won’t come from access to the newest model. It will come from how effectively intelligence is operationalised and how quickly the organisation can adapt as the technology evolves.
This shift is becoming increasingly important as AI moves beyond personal productivity into operational environments. AI is supporting decision making, strengthening cyber operations, automating workflows, and helping organisations deliver critical services. As organisations embed these capabilities into day-to-day operations, they are also becoming increasingly dependent on the intelligence that underpins them.
Most organisations already manage risk across critical technology services through business continuity planning, supplier risk management, and cyber resilience. Applying the same thinking to AI is becoming increasingly important as organisations build operational capability around technologies that continue to evolve at pace.
Replacing a model is rarely the difficult part. Over time, organisations build workflows, governance processes, evaluation frameworks, and operating procedures around the behaviour of a particular model. The technology itself may be interchangeable, yet the operational capability built around it is often far less adaptable. That’s where dependency begins to emerge.
Rather than viewing AI decisions solely through the lens of capability, organisations should consider three connected factors: capability, cost, and control.
Capability remains the catalyst for adoption, with AI continuing to improve productivity, strengthen decision making, and create new opportunities to transform services. Cost extends beyond licensing and infrastructure to include the investment required to maintain flexibility, avoid unnecessary lock-in, and preserve the ability to respond as technology, markets, and commercial conditions change.
Control, however, is becoming increasingly strategic. AI exists within a broader ecosystem of cloud platforms, infrastructure providers, regulation, and commercial agreements that organisations cannot influence directly. The choices they can make relate to where flexibility matters, where resilience justifies additional investment and where convenience may introduce unnecessary operational risk.
The organisations that create lasting value from AI won’t necessarily be those that predict which frontier model succeeds. They will be the organisations that invest in the governance, engineering discipline, and operating models that let AI capability evolve without disrupting critical services.
This also changes the role of leadership. Rather than focusing solely on today’s technology decisions, leaders need confidence that their organisations can adapt as the underlying assumptions behind those decisions continue to change.
The role of leadership hasn’t fundamentally changed. Leaders are still making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. What is changing is the speed at which the assumptions underpinning those decisions evolve.
The organisations that recognise frontier AI as a capability that will continually evolve, rather than a permanent source of competitive advantage, will be better positioned to build resilient services and realise lasting value from AI.
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