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Selling Surplus or Scarcity: Where AI Margin Lives
- chris-d 8mo agoAuthor here. We often hear that 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail. But the real friction in large organizations isn't the 95% that fail—it's the 5% that actually work, which the institutional immune system then actively tries to kill. In this piece, I look at the recent $300B SaaS wipeout and argue that the market is finally pricing in a brutal divide: companies selling "surplus" (staff aug, API wrappers) vs. companies selling "scarcity" (liability shields, deep workflow integration). The core thesis: Generative AI killed the IT "Dark Room." Failures are now instantly visible to the board, benchmarked against a $20 ChatGPT subscription. Because of this transparency, what enterprises are actually buying when they sign a $5M contract isn't better technology than a $50k pilot. They are buying a legal and political liability shield. To map this, I propose shifting from the traditional tech stack to a margin-based "Value Stack" (Infrastructure > Runtime > Governance > Workflow), where Governance functions as an independent, highly profitable economic layer. Curious if folks building B2B AI tools here are experiencing this friction between selling pure tech (surplus) vs. selling operational accountability (scarcity).