Don’t Sell GenAI — Sell the Outcome

When GenAI founders come to me for advice — especially those navigating enterprise sales — I always start with a straightforward question:

“Who’s your competition?”

More often than not, I get a shrug. Sometimes it’s wrapped in optimism: “We’re creating a new category,” or “There’s no one doing exactly what we’re doing.”

That sounds bold. But here’s the problem:
In enterprise sales, budget is almost never created. It’s reallocated.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sums it up from his “thoughts on Generative AI” memo:

“ We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.” — Andy Jassy

So if you don’t know who you’re competing with, try asking yourself this instead: “Whose budget are we taking?”

That’s the real question. Because even if you’re a GenAI startup inventing a brand-new capability, you’re almost always displacing someone or something at the beginning. A vendor. An internal team. A line item in a CFO spreadsheet.

Here’s the hard truth when it comes to enterprise sales:
Innovation doesn’t sell. Outcomes do.

You may get some wins here and there with some early innovators and adopters, but it won’t scale unless the outcomes are evident.

GenAI Isn’t the Moat. It’s the Minimum.

Today, GenAI is table stakes. Every boardroom is talking about it. Every procurement team has a list of 10 vendors that claim they “do AI.” You are not going to sneak up on the competition anymore. Not in this environment.

So what do you do?

You get strategic. You get competitor aware.

And no, that doesn’t mean you become competitor obsessed. At Amazon, we talk about being customer obsessed — not competitor obsessed. But that obsession means understanding every alternative your customer might consider. Not just to win the deal, but to build the right product.

Because if your customer is already paying someone to solve this problem — even partially — you need to know why that solution isn’t good enough. And you need to align your messaging, roadmap, and sales playbook around that gap.

Competitor Awareness Makes You Stronger

Being competitor aware helps you:

Refine your value proposition. If your competitor added your GenAI feature tomorrow, would your differentiator disappear? If yes, you’re not differentiated.
Understand your customer’s context. You’re not entering a vacuum. You’re entering a landscape of existing tools, habits, budgets, and politics.
Sell with empathy. If your buyer has to justify cutting Vendor X’s contract to make room for you, you better be able to help them make that case.
Build smarter. Product decisions become sharper when they’re made in the context of how customers currently cope — not just how they should behave in an ideal world.

Category Creation Is Rare. Budget Displacement Is Not.

Yes, category creation is sexy. It gets headlines. But even new categories almost always cannibalize old budgets.

Take GenAI startups building vertical tools — legal brief drafting, clinical documentation, financial modeling. These tools are promising, but they’re not creating new line items. They’re trying to take budget from incumbents who have entrenched relationships, procurement hooks, and credibility. To succeed, they must find differentiation not just in offering GenAI features — but in how they apply GenAI using unique data sets, workflows, or domain expertise that incumbents can’t easily replicate.

Customer Obsession Means Knowing the Alternatives

Being competitor aware is being customer obsessed.
It means you respect your buyer’s time, attention, and constraints. It means you understand that the best way to serve your customer isn’t to ignore the alternatives — they’ve already tried them. Your job is to show them a better outcome — with your product or service. It’s to build something that delivers clearer, faster, or more impactful results than what they already have.

So next time someone asks, “Who’s your competition?” — don’t dismiss the question.

Answer it. Then build accordingly.