Built ≠ Bought: When Distribution Is the Real AI Moat
About this session
Every week brings a better model; and every week, good AI products quietly fail. Not because they don’t work, but because no one designed how they reach and win their first customers. In this fast lightning talk, Alana makes the case that for AI products, distribution and adoption are the real moat, not model performance. Drawing on bringing AI-powered commerce and CX products to market across the Shopify ecosystem, she’ll share why technically superior AI loses to better-distributed AI, and the pricing, channel, and first-customer decisions that close the gap between “built” and “bought.”
Speaker
Key takeaways
- Why model quality is now table stakes, and how distribution, not performance, decides which AI products win their market
- Where to find and land your first customers, i.e. the channel and ecosystem moves that get an AI product adopted instead of just admired
- How to price for adoption, not just revenue...so your pricing pulls buyers in rather than stalling the deal