As the founder and board chair of the tech nonprofit Products That Count, Ive had a front-row seat to AIs domination of the tech world over the past couple of years. A few years ago, just a sliver of the thousands of submissions our organization evaluates for our awards program were AI-based; this year, more than 90% of our nearly 10,000 submissions were for AI products.
This exponential growth has made one thing painfully clear: AI has already become table stakes. In 2023, generative AI was the hot new buzzword; last year, agentic AI was the new kid on the blockand this trend is only going to continue.
Just look at the product development cycles today for clues: AI skips pilots and goes straight to deployment. First movers are outpaced; OpenAI, Mistral, and Perplexity can no longer keep up with the pace of innovation organically, so theyve started to buy speed by making acquisitions.
With AI no longer a differentiator, what matters is not just that you have AI but how youre using it. What separates the winners from the losers here isnt speed to launchits become clear that this is a futile race. Instead, what really determines whether a product will have sticking power today is how the AI is used in its context. As one committee member commented in reviewing this years awards program nominees: Its not about the data. Its about what you can do with it.
The right weapon
Just like picking your weapon for battle, the winning AI product is whatever is the most strategically advantaged in that fight.
Here are the three major strategic traits that have emerged from evaluating thousands of AI products over the last few years. These traits show what winning AI products today are doing differently from their competitors, giving them the edge in an increasingly crowded field:
1. They have strategically superior moatsbuilt on data, personalization and customer intuition
The right data, not MORE data, is the real moat. – Google Cloud Product Lead Varun Krovvidi (2025 awards committee)
In the era of open APIs and fast followers, only the most thoughtfully designed products will be able to claim any lasting territory. Todays winners in AI wont just move fast; theyll think strategically and build moats that are based on true value. The name of the game here is personalization, but not the personalization we think we know.
Next-gen personalization will go far beyond extracting ad recommendations from search history, or suggesting your next binge watch. The next winning formula in personalization knows users deeply, and knows not just their tastes, but also how they prefer to consume information, how they prioritize, what data theyre comfortable sharing. As Krovvidi said, Were seeing AI products use AI-driven feedback loops across diverse functions. This also means that AI will be used to understand the customer in a way that has never been done before.
Just as Apple in the 2010s wrote the rulebook for what a personalized product should look like, we are now facing the next Apple-style revolution in good user design. True personalization is now a verticalized play, not a horizontal one. And successful personalization in this verticalized fashion is based on two core pillars: unique, high-quality data (not quantity, but connected insights on user preferences) and context-aware preferences (not just what users want, but how and where they want it). Combine these, and you get the next-gen disruptors.
2. They leverage ecosystems and interoperability as their competitive advantage
Interconnectedness is what sets apart the winners from the rest in todays AI era. Whether its interoperable AI agents that hook into each other and collaborate to add greater value, or a niche tool thats highly specialized to plug into a technical and entrenched ecosystem and complete microlevel changes, the best AI products today are not just keenly aware of their contexttheyre explicitly designed to operate within them.This means designing products with not just an awareness of but an active optimization towards the existing infrastructure around them, acting as connective tissue rather than mass. The mantra here is 1+1=3. Superior AI tools today dont just offer value in a vacuum, they find ways to collaborate with other toolseven other AI agentswhere the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
3. Theyre serious about privacynot UX ethics lip service & compliance theater
Trust, privacy, and human-centric design are now essential building blocks of any great product.– Nicolas Rousseau, Chief Digital Engineering & Manufacturing Officer, Capgemini (2025 awards committee)If we thought privacy and ethics mattered previously, that goes double (or triple) in the era of AI. In the best of the best AI products, privacy is now the default mode. Opt-out is now opt-in. Superior AI products today assume users want control over their data, encryption, and anonymizing. We see an increasing number of product strategies centered on privacy-preserving architectures and decentralized intelligence, added Rousseau. From platforms that drive healthcare equity through remote monitoring to fintech solutions that democratize access to Capital, tech for good is no longer an afterthought but a competitive advantage.
The great AI products are the most strategically and thoughtfully built
If AI has started to feel like a fast-fashion race, the products that will win the day are those that keep focused on building quality over quantity and filling a genuine vertical end-to-end. The speed of evolution today means that the winning teams are not just cranking out the newest model and shipping it. Theyre taking stock of the ecosystem, building highly personalized and valuable tools that play nice with each other, and putting a premium on ethical design.
