Seize the Opportunities Before Your Competitors Do

Almost every AI guide opens with a threat. Not literally. But the message is clear: act now or lose.

Seize the opportunities before your competitors do. The sentence appears on the first page of almost every technology guide of the past twenty years. Before it said e-commerce, then digitalization, then cloud, now AI, and the development will never stop. Neither will the fear.

It’s called FOMO. Fear of Missing Out. In marketing it’s always been a very reliable tool. When people are afraid of missing something, that’s a fairly simple marketing mechanism. Because fear replaces the hard work of making an argument.

Fear as a sales pitch sounds perhaps plausible for medication, insurance or alarm systems, but for technology it sounds utterly absurd to me. I ask myself a simple question with every sales argument: would this product also work if nobody was afraid? If the answer is no, then what’s being sold isn’t the product but the fear.

In my thirty years of professional experience I’ve been through many technology cycles and I know the constantly repeating patterns well enough. It starts with a lot of enthusiasm, which quickly turns into the majority’s fear of missing out. In between come phases of disappointment because things don’t always work as planned or promised, and only much later does broad adoption begin.

The fact is: The best technologies have never needed fear as a sales trigger. They solve a problem you had before you knew a solution existed. AI can be that, but not in the version that tells you to act now or you’ll lose. When someone wants to sell me something and the first sentence is a threat, I ask myself whether they have anything to offer besides fear.