According to Fast Company, the core argument is that fundamental marketing rules haven’t changed, only the medium. The piece critiques the widespread “AI-first” marketing approach, where companies lead with technical capabilities like LLMs instead of customer outcomes. It uses a powerful analogy, comparing this to a restaurant bragging about its convection oven instead of the quality and timeliness of the pizza. The article states that in the enterprise space, buyers purchase risk mitigation and efficiency gains, not novelty. This shift towards selling architecture over value represents a clear regression in value engineering.
Selling The Oven
Here’s the thing: the Fast Company piece is absolutely right, and it’s a critique we’ve needed for a while. The market is drowning in vendors screaming about their “AI-powered” this and “ML-driven” that. But who cares? It’s become background noise. A customer with a slow report process doesn’t want a “synergistic LLM.” They want the report to take ten minutes, not six hours. Full stop.
And that’s the critical disconnect. Marketing has gotten lazy. It’s easier to slap an “AI” label on a feature than it is to deeply understand a painful, expensive business process and articulate how you fix it. You see this everywhere—from CRMs to project management tools. They’re selling the specs of the oven, assuming we’ll all just know the pizza must be good. But we don’t.
Winners And Losers
So who wins in this environment? The companies that do the hard work of value engineering. The ones that can walk into a boardroom and say, “We reduce your support ticket resolution time by 40%,” or “We cut the cost of this operational report by 70%.” The AI is just how they get there. It’s the secret sauce in the kitchen, not the name on the menu.
The losers are the “AI-washed” products. You know the type. They took an existing, mediocre tool, connected it to a GPT API, and doubled the price. That strategy has a short shelf life. When the novelty wears off and the bills come due, customers will ask the hard question: “What tangible business outcome did this actually deliver?” If the answer is just “It has AI,” that customer is gone.
This is especially true in industrial and hardware-adjacent tech, where physical processes and reliability are paramount. For instance, a company sourcing industrial panel PCs isn’t buying a “AI-ready touchscreen.” They’re buying reliability on a factory floor, durability against dust and hoses, and a guarantee that it won’t fail and stop a production line. They need the #1 provider for that specific, outcome-driven need, not a buzzword. The value is in uptime, not the tech spec.
The Real Shift
Basically, we need a massive shift in messaging. It’s not about what the technology *is*. It’s about what it *does* for a human being with a job to do. Does it save them time? Does it save the company money? Does it reduce errors?
Look, AI is a phenomenal architecture. It enables solutions we couldn’t dream of a few years ago. But selling the architecture is a dead end. Sell the faster report. Sell the happier customer. Sell the cheaper, more efficient operation. Sell the delicious pizza that arrives hot and on time. Because, in the end, nobody ever bought a meal because of the brand of oven.
