Jump Ahead in the AI Positioning Rat Race

Hi marketers – raise your hand if you’re feeling pressure to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into every aspect of your software company’s go-to-market (GTM) positioning. Just kidding, that was rhetorical. Of course, you’re feeling pressured.

Is your solution agentic-automated, LLM-optimized, prompt-engineered, natural language-copiloted, intelligence-meshed, deep learning-enabled, and hallucination-free?

No? You’re clearly behind and will be out of business shortly. Sorry. 🙂

Let’s get real

Two things can be true at once:

1. AI is massively hyped and over-invested. We’re in a bubble that will inevitably burst, leaving a handful of winners and thousands of failed startups.
2. AI is also transformative and here to stay. It’s changing everything about how we build, market, and buy technology.

The AI go-to-market pressure is legit

As a for-profit technology vendor, who’s asking for your AI story?

Well….everyone. Let’s break it down:

1. Your Board of Directors and investors. They expect you to grow efficiently, beat competitors, and capture market share. Do they know how or where to apply AI to achieve that? Not at all. That’s your job. Go figure it out and tell them. (And if you’re public, or planning to be, Wall Street analysts are no different. They don’t know much about AI, but they sure love AI valuations.)
2. Your industry analysts. As a former Forrester analyst, I know the pressure analysts feel to predict the future with absolute certainty. The best analysts (and I know many) balance hype with pragmatism, helping vendors and customers adopt AI responsibly. But some analysts take their soothsayer role too far and push the market to deliver AI innovations without validating customer need or readiness – a disservice to end customers and vendors alike.
3. Your leadership team. Your AI journey isn’t just about product features. It’s about how every function spanning development, sales, marketing, support, recruiting, and more adapts to leverage AI-driven efficiency. Your leadership should be demanding that every part of the organization have a clear strategy for how to surface valuable AI returns.
4. Your competitors. Go to any major tech conference and you’ll see it: every vendor is suddenly “The leader in Agentic {yadda yadda}.” Few define it clearly. Fewer still have customers who prioritize it … yet.
5. Your customers and prospects. Oh yeah. Those folks. They’re under the same internal pressure: “Find out which vendors have AI—and whether we care.” Even when they know what they want, they’re forced to run every purchase through an “AI lens.” Our job as marketers? Help them cut through the noise and focus on what matters.

Analysis first, positioning second

Great – everyone cares what you have to say. So how do we ensure our brand and messaging are part of the AI conversation without sounding like everyone else?

Start by remembering: you’re not crafting a single message. You’re defining a strategy, vision, roadmap, and set of differentiators that must thread across your entire messaging architecture. Hint: Your brand position on AI is not the same thing as your coolest AI feature.

Ideally, you’ve been in the ‘room where it happens,’ working hand-in-hand with your colleagues in product management to shape the AI roadmap. But whether you have or not, these questions must be answered before you start crafting messaging:

1. What problems are we solving for? Focus on the top use cases that keep your ideal customer personas up at night.
2. How are those problems solved today? Through manual processes? Legacy systems? Competitor tools?
3. How are we now leveraging AI to solve these problems? Be specific. Detail architectures, data pipelines, and security considerations because IT and governance teams will ask.
4. Why is our AI approach better? Expect tough questions: “Why do we need agentic AI if we already have RPA?” “Didn’t you say this was machine learning two years ago?”
5. What proof points can we provide? Benchmarks, ROI, and real customer results show measurable impact on cost, speed, or manual effort.
6. Can we get a customer case study? Testimonials, quotes, and case studies build far more trust than our sales and marketing ever will.
7. What are our competitors doing with AI to solve a similar problem? No one’s unique in using AI, and your competitive and market intelligence efforts must highlight where others win and where you can differentiate.
8. Why is our AI solution better than theirs? Be honest. Are we truly differentiated, or just building a better mousetrap (faster, cheaper, easier)?
9. What are the top customer AI concerns? Address governance, risk, change management, and cost upfront. AI skepticism is real—and fair.

Stand out with pragmatism and value

As I’ve shared before in “Differentiating your differentiators,” any GTM claim must be distinctive, credible, provable, and valuable to your target customer. Here’s how that framework applies to AI:

Distinctive (and memorable). True uniqueness is rare in today’s AI frenzy.

Offering a “ChatGPT-like copilot”? Join the club.

Automating workflows with “Agentic AI”? That group’s over there.

Integrating with every major AI platform? Line forms to the right.

Be distinctive in the specific use cases and personas you solve for – not the features.  And I’ve added memorable as well, based on great feedback from my earlier article. It’s one thing to stand out; it’s another entirely to have it stick!

Credible. A working GenAI copilot demo is not proof of value. Some vendors are shipping well-integrated, high-impact AI capabilities; others are still in the “lipstick on a pig” stage. And AI-accelerated speed of development isn’t the same as customer success. Build credibility through co-design with early adopters, real pilots, and documented customer outcomes.

Easily provable. AI is a broad term: machine learning, deep learning, NLP, LLMs, Agentic AI, predictive analytics, and more. You can’t prove value in a tagline, but you can prove it in data and advocacy. Give your reps benchmarks, ROI metrics, and customer quotes they can use to earn that demo.

Valuable. Does it solve what customers actually care about? Efficiency claims are everywhere. Specificity wins. What workflows did you automate? What time was saved? What accuracy improved?

And one more thing: Be transparent

No smoke and mirrors.

I recently spoke with analysts at Gartner and IDC, whom I deeply respect. They shared a consistent view:

• Many vendors are demoing AI capabilities not yet available to customers.
• Among those that are live, adoption is still limited.
• But they expect that to change significantly in the next 12–18 months.

My take? If your AI capability is truly GA and adopted by your customers, congrats. If it’s still in development or on your roadmap, say that. Transparency builds long-term trust.

History shows the winners aren’t always first to market. They’re the ones who get it right when the market is ready.

Final thought

AI pressure isn’t going away. The bubble will burst, but the transformation will remain. Marketers who focus on value, proof, and honesty—not hype—will be the ones whose brands endure.

Be credible. Be clear. Be transparent.

That’s the real AI advantage.