The AI Strategy Archetype Map: Five Paths to Competitive Advantage

The AI competitive landscape has crystallized into five distinct strategic archetypes. Each represents a fundamentally different philosophy for creating and capturing value, and each has demonstrated market viability.

The Five Archetypes

Archetype Thesis Examples
Strategic Enablers Be the dependency, not the competitor NVIDIA, Apple
Full-Stack Integrators Control the chain, harvest synergy Google, Microsoft
Specialized Dominators Focused excellence beats broad mediocrity OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta
Domain Specialists Owning the workflow beats owning the model Salesforce, ServiceNow, SAP
Focused Experts Go deep before going wide Cursor, Glean, Replit

The Key Insight

The AI market has matured beyond a simple race for model superiority. The winner of the next decade won’t be determined by who has the best model, but by who chose their strategic position wisely and executed with discipline.

The industry’s trajectory favors:

  • Strategic focus over feature wars
  • Workflow ownership over model benchmarks
  • Sustainable economics over infrastructure arms races
  • Depth over breadth

The question every company must answer: Which archetype matches your capabilities, and do you have the discipline to execute within it?


This is part of a comprehensive analysis. Read the full analysis on The Business Engineer.

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