3green Limited blog

AI is becoming the customer

andy@3green.biz (Andrew Mitchell) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:52:02 GMT

I know, I know, we’ve all reached peak AI. Endless news, trends, and that delicious daily serving of slop in our social feeds.

But stay with me for a moment. AI isn’t just YOUR secret helper anymore. It's quietly switched sides and right now might be helping your customer to find an angle on you.

Between you and me, the impact of AI has been increasingly playing on my mind. Like everyone who thinks for a living, I’ve become very aware that everything I’ve learned and practiced over the years could be made redundant overnight.

A few years back, when I first opened ChatGPT for a play, this existential disruption felt a lifetime away. But I always knew it was just a matter of time before I’d be forced to step up or ship out.

This stopped being just experimentation

Now I’m certainly no luddite, but my approach to the “early AI years” was simply to acclimatise and experiment. This gentlemanly pace to tech adoption led me to make some epic misjudgments which I’ve written about here before. This world was neatly compartmentalised in my head; I continued consulting in the way I’ve always done, while experimenting with my new robot overlords in a wholly separate mental space. In equal parts amazed and confused by the tech, I never felt the need to take any drastic action to adapt my business, as the two worlds didn’t need to intersect yet. In fact, as I gradually adopted more diverse AI tools, it felt the same as adding new products to my stack to lift productivity, just as I’ve always quietly done in the background.

From experimentation to reinvention

But something has flipped in my attitude recently that I can’t quite put my finger on. I bounded into this year motivated to completely reinvent my positioning practice and build a central new offering, one which is AI optimised to the core. There is a spot more to refine, but I’m excited to say you’ll all see it hit the market in the coming months.

A friend asked me recently what clicked in my mindset, to push me from experimentation last year to re-invention now? It’s a profound question that I find terrifically hard to answer, perhaps I'm just subconsciously trying to take back control in a time of huge market change? But as somebody who strives to create mental order through my work, I find AI adoption exhausting. It's like a game of cerebral whack-a-mole just trying to keep up, so time will tell if my wholesale adoption of an AI-first practice is just me trying to tidy the world again!

AI can accelerate articulation, not understanding

I remain incredibly optimistic about the positive impact AI will have on market positioning. However, although LLMs are brilliant at playing with words, I've learned that doesn’t make them automatically brilliant at positioning. The confidence that an LLM can articulate a Value Proposition leads us to overlook the quality or validity of the inputs for that proposition. The grunt work in positioning isn't the final flourish, but the relentless accumulation of meaningful customer and market insight.

AI can streamline, but can't replace this foundational work in positioning projects. When we confuse confidence with truth, we risk just arriving at the wrong answer faster.

However, AI is challenging our traditional methodology for positioning in some less obvious ways too.

AI is becoming the customer

The most pressing example for us all is how AI has become the universal B2B customer. In many cases, it’s already the first pass filter deciding who even makes the short-list.

The rise of agentic AI in B2B sales is a functional game changer for everybody. These specialised AI interfaces act on behalf of users to discover products, negotiate pricing and execute transactions. Forrester predicts that by the end of 2026, 90% of B2B buying will be AI agent-intermediated, representing a $15 trillion shift in spend.

In other words, AI has jumped from being our assistant to become everybody’s "gatekeeper".

That changes how positioning works. We're no longer just building propositions for humans. We're building propositions that machines have to interpret without us.

AI now needs to be treated as a "customer" in its own right.

I suspect this will lead to a new layer in positioning. Something along the lines of "Machine-Readable Trust Signals”, but I’ll dive into this for you in a few months when I’ve got a few more test cycles out the way.

Positioning is now always on

The change of pace this introduces is hard to ignore. Positioning used to be something we could step into periodically. Gone is the luxury of time we used to have, where we could validate thoroughly before committing to a new position.

Agentic AI has to become the eyes on the back of our head, autonomously sifting data into insights, updating our market models so we can keep one step ahead of competitors and trends. Plainly positioning becomes less of a side project, and more of a continuous system.

Disrupt yourself before someone else does

All of this can feel fast and exhausting. But as we overhaul our products and businesses to fully embrace this tech, our sense of exploration and fun should remain intact. This is a rare moment where the rules are still being written.

We’re in a phase of rapid change, so the more experiments we can all run with our methodology, the faster we can all learn. It’s down to us to encourage each other to rip up the established rules and, to badly paraphrase Christensen, find greater joy in disrupting ourselves before somebody else does it for us.

If this is already affecting how your buyers evaluate you, I’d be interested to hear what you’re experiencing right now.

Push back the push back

andy@3green.biz (Andrew Mitchell) — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 02:40:03 GMT

I’m sure you’ve been there, sitting round the table listening to a leadership team under pressure share their worries. You hear stories of competitors eating away product differentiation, sales cycles dragging out too long and teams pulling in opposite directions as the funding runway shortens terrifyingly quickly.

From your perspective, all symptoms point to a single problem. Slow to convert, hard to describe but little reason to choose over your competitor? It’s not a disaster you say, you’ve just lost market-fit. It’s time to tune up your positioning again.

So far so simple. But as you’ve probably experienced, building consensus to take meaningful action about positioning is a really big step.

“Positioning work often creates resistance long before it creates results.”

It’s certainly not unusual to encounter resistance to positioning work. I used to dismiss it as a simple reaction to workload. Often exec teams have only been involved in “major” positioning work, perhaps at the start of a venture or in the business case for a product launch. These are big strategic calls, so it’s understandable that some people conflate positioning with mountains of work and risk.

But I’ve learned to take a more nuanced view of this resistance as I’ve got older. So much so that sometimes I’m the one doing the resisting.

Consensus feels safer than change

When left unattended, everybody’s positioning will weaken over time. We all have to buckle down and review from time to time. That said, very few people proactively track the health of “their positioning” in real time. We behave like we will never have to take action.

In fact, it's surprising hard for any one individual in a business to experience all the signals of weakening positioning. Sales teams watch how customers respond, product teams track usage of features, while marketing teams listen intently to what competitor’s say. Everybody owns a different piece for the positioning puzzle. And a single piece is never convincing enough evidence to suggest that it's necessary to take action now.

So when somebody collates the signals and suggests repositioning, it’s usually a prickly surprise. There is cognitive dissonance between each exec's personal experience and the imagined workload or risk of updating their positioning. Deep inside, their brain is telling them that the proposed solution is way out of proportion to the problem they can see. Their push back "to wait and see" comes from a genuine place of truth.

But hesitation simply pushes the problem out to be solved in the future, heightening market risk rather than mitigating it.

Markets move while teams hesitate

I’ve become adept at handling "not now, lets wait and see" conversations over the years. My aim is never to force through unmerited work, but rather to face the team with two much more profound questions. Instead of asking if we should review positioning, I ask them when they should update their positioning and why that's the right time to take action.

This little flip is gold.

Because it reminds that team that their positioning is alive; continually shifting relative to the needs of their customers and the actions of their competitors, regardless of what they hope or plan. Much like painting the exterior of your home, it’s up to you to choose when to do it. Too early and you’re creating excess work, too late and you’ve let the rot take hold.

Build triggers before emotion takes over

Knowing when to build a consensus for action depends on the whole exec team sharing a common threshold for commercial discomfort. How pressured does it have to get before we take action? As in any strategic work, a few common rules agreed in advance make life so much simpler later on.

I like to set some business rule around three sets of "positioning triggers". For each trigger, just define what the threshold is to consider it worthy of action.

Internal triggers (things you choose to do)

Developing a new product
Launching a major product upgrade
Significant changes to prices

External triggers (things that get done to you)

New competitor enters market
Competitor enters or exits your value segment
Significant impact on market affordability

Pain triggers (things you experience)

Sales are too slow to convert
Products are too similar to competitor
Proposition is too hard for market to understand

I like to use a simple spreadsheet that forms part of the strategy stack, naturally the more quantitative the tolerance point is for each trigger, the easier it is to administer. In more sophisticated teams it’s possible to calculate the cost of inaction, but don’t sweat it. The very process of deciding this in advance is the exact groundwork you need. It familiarises your colleagues about the reality of maintaining a great position in market and eliminates the opinions of the loudest voice in the team.

Above all, it means no more prickly surprises and push back when a positioning refresh pops back onto your strategic agenda in the coming months. After all, a little less noise, a little more action, is good for everyone’s business.

Article from the May 2026 re:position

When your edge becomes expected. Two simple tests to protect your positioning when trends fade. READ THE FULL NEWSLETTER HERE and SIGN UP HERE if you’d like to receive this in your inbox next time.

Category Matters

andy@3green.biz (Andrew Mitchell) — Thu, 14 May 2026 22:10:04 GMT

A question for you; did you choose the category that you’re in, or did your category choose you? A little philosophical perhaps, but I suspect that you won’t have thought about your choice of category since your earliest days of proving product market fit.

Category choice does most of the heavy lifting in our market positioning, but rarely gets the credit. It’s become a set and forget decision as we set out, soon becoming cemented as one of those “just what we are” facts of business.

Yet category is a topic that deserves much deeper understanding, far beyond the outset of a venture. Most founders understandably believe that their category is pre-ordained, that it’s a label based on what your product “does”. In reality however, category is a major strategic choice; far from being a passive construct, it’s shorthand for the market where you compete.

Decoding the concept

Before we dive in, it’s useful to be reminded of what a simple concept “category” is.

A category is a theoretical label that describes a group of products which provide similar functional value. Or more bluntly, it's a group of products that broadly offer the same thing to the same customer.

Everything we make or offer has a corresponding category. Often these are quite formal classifications, helping the government to categorise the myriad of businesses that they serve. But for anybody trying to make sales, category provides the essential grammar of commerce. Informing retailers where to range your product on-shelf and helping buyers to find what they really want next.

Your category is a market signpost

Your category does three broad things for you;

It puts you in a default competitor set

Since a category is a group of similar products that compete for the same customer, as soon as you enter that category you are technically in competition for share with every single incumbent. Although you will refine it by channel, price and by features, buyers will mentally group you at a category level first and make hidden comparisons before they enter your sales funnel.

It sets the market’s pricing norms

Categories naturally segment based on value; differentiation on price is essential as categories or technology matures. The current spread of prices vs value in a category will instantly tell you where the current top and bottom thresholds are for pricing. Going beyond those thresholds means challenging the established norms, which takes time and an indomitable value proposition.

It signals your value proposition to buyers

Being seen in a group of similar products enables buyers to intuitively know what to expect from you, even before they’ve engaged. Their expectation of your features or service levels will be based on what they have experienced from your competitors, not by you.

Hence a lack of foresight about the category you compete for can make you appear out of place, like an accidental Frankenstein. So beware of strategic inaction, taking no action just means even less control of how the market sees you.

When you adopt a category by default, you instantly set your market’s expectation of your pricing, product and service levels, before you utter a single word. For example, if you’re launching in Accounting Software, you’re instantly compared with the value offered by Xero, MYOB or Quickbooks, whether you think you’re directly competing with them or not.

Category rules are made to be broken

There is plenty of advice out there about the fabled “category of one”. Indeed, when you have a truly innovative proposition for the market, it’s tempting to convince yourself that you don’t fit it anywhere, that you’re just “too ahead of the curve”. In my experience this is ego talking so don’t be fooled into conflating category choice with differentiation, as you simply don’t need your own category to differentiate.

Choosing to set up your personal category of one is choosing to build your market from scratch. You have to educate your buyer on everything you do, every little detail and nuance. There is no budget line ready for you, or easy way for buyers to compare and justify their purchase decision. This is a slow, hard and expensive path. I’ve personally made this mistake once, so take it from one who has lived to regret it deeply.

But don’t despair, competing inside a well defined category isn’t a sentence to conformity. It just means using what buyers instinctively understand about a category already to free you to position more precisely based on your own strengths.

Categories do evolve over time, particularly the elasticity of their value segments, so don’t ever stop challenging the norms of your collective competitors.

Does changing category create more value?

This is a common question where I always find the fence. It depends. Category shifts are usually triggered by extensive product development or by range extension. The shift gives you access to a different customer need or pain point, but not always a different buyer. It is common for a product portfolio to stretch across categories over time, although this always creates significant comms challenges to counter.

What changing your category won’t do is get you away from competitors. It simply offers a different competitive set to tangle with, but perhaps one that you are better suited to overcome.

Check in on your category choice

Even if you’re not actively repositioning at the moment, it’s worth knowing how effectively your category choice is working for you. So while you hit your second coffee today, try this quick exercise.

Q: Spotlight on your category norms

What are the unspoken rules of your category?
Do you adhere to these rules or challenge them? Why?
What advantage does that give to you?

Remember, when you’re choosing your category, you’re choosing what metric you want to be judged on. In many ways it pre-defines how you compete. Whether you are a category agitator or a category conformist doesn’t determine success. But being aware of the value your category provides certainly helps you stay one step ahead.

Article from the March 2026 re:position

When your edge becomes expected. Two simple tests to protect your positioning when trends fade. READ THE FULL NEWSLETTER HERE and SIGN UP HERE if you’d like to receive this in your inbox next time.