I used to go to a small fishing spot on a stream not far from Tokyo. The water was clear, the fishing was good, and it felt like a hidden secret.
One spring, after a season of heavy rains, the main river nearby swelled to twice its normal size. In the process, it carved a new path. Its current was so powerful it simply absorbed my little stream. The fishing spot vanished. It didn't dry up; it was just swallowed by something bigger.
You may have built the best fishing spot in the world. A perfect AI point solution that does one thing more brilliantly than anyone else.
But you are building on a stream.
And the river is rising.
The big platforms—the Googles, the OpenAIs, the Microsofts—are not just building products. They are changing the landscape. They are the river, and their current is so strong it is redefining the flow of everything around it.
For you, your one feature is your entire company. It’s your passion.
For them, it is a single line item on a quarterly product roadmap. A checkbox to be ticked. It is a stream they can choose to merge with, divert, or absorb at will.
This is the reality of building a point solution in the age of platforms. You are not competing with another product. You are competing with a force of nature.
So how do you avoid being washed away? You don't try to out-muscle the river. You must change your relationship to it. You have two paths:
1. Go Deeper.
You must become the underground spring that feeds the river. This means solving a problem so specific, so complex, and so deeply embedded in a vertical workflow that it is not worth the platform’s time to replicate. You don’t build a generic image recognizer. You build the AI that can detect hairline fractures in turbine blades with 99.99% accuracy. You don't just become part of your customer's workflow; you become the most critical, irreplaceable component of it.
2. Go Wider.
You become the delta, the system that connects the river to the ocean. You don't do one thing; you connect all the other things. You become the central nervous system for your customer. You ingest data from OpenAI, process it, combine it with data from Salesforce, and send a command to a third system. Your value isn't in your unique AI model; it's in your control of the entire ecosystem. You are the essential plumbing that makes all the other tools more valuable.
So look at what you are building. And keep an eye on the river.