Fad or Shift: Three Questions to Ask Before the Market Answers for You

In 2003 I worked at a consulting firm. Every time I explained to a client why they had to move into digital, I got the same answer: "What exactly do you want from us with this internet thing?" Back then, plenty of people still thought it would blow over.

Nobody said no. They said "interesting, let's revisit next quarter." Two years later they were revisiting, and their competitors were already there.

The same story is playing out with AI, with the same tension underneath it: FOMO on one side, the fear of burning resources on a gimmick on the other.

Three questions you can answer today, without predicting anything:

1. Have your customers already changed behaviour? In 2003, someone buying an air conditioner called three stores or walked between them. By 2005 they arrived already knowing the model and the price. Companies missed it because they asked "do we need to invest in an expensive website?" instead of "is the customer reaching us differently?"

Today the customer asks a language model what to buy before they ever reach Google, and gets three options. If you are not one of them, you did not drop in the rankings. You are simply not in the conversation.

Ask your last five customers how they found you. If the answer is different from a year ago, this stopped being a technology question.

2. Is it a tool, or does it erase a process? A tool means the same work, faster. Infrastructure means the work itself no longer makes sense.

When you can produce two hundred creative variations a day, the weekly creative meeting is not inefficient. It is a leftover from a world where production was expensive. You are not optimising that process, you are deleting it. The test: if you can adopt it without changing a single management decision, it is a tool.

3. What happens if you miss it? Miss a fad and you lose time. You come in a year later and catch up, or it passes without anyone noticing. Miss a shift and you lose money on every transaction. If new competitors have appeared, and they are cutting prices because their cost structure is different, you are not late. You are out.

In the AI era you don't lose a market on the wrong decision. You lose it on the decision that never got made.

Which change in your customers' behaviour has already happened, while you are still calling it a trend?