The early adoption dividend

All businesses face technology decisions, but a less talked about (yet fundamental) question is where they should sit on the technology adoption curve. Many don't choose at all and drift, from the innovators out front, to the fast followers who fear missing out, to the laggards holding onto yesterday's initiatives long after they've stopped delivering.

Which risk are you choosing?

Every position carries risk; if a business moves too early it's expensive and distracting. If it moves too slowly, you can get left behind (the "Kodak moments"). The real question isn't whether you're taking risk with technology adoption, it's knowing and actively choosing which risk you're taking.

That feels particularly relevant in 2026 as boards and leadership teams seem to feel the pressure to "do something", or the classic I heard this week, "do the AI". But it's not a dance move and putting aside the hype, the challenge isn't about doing something, but about making deliberate decisions about where technology can create genuine advantage and where patience is a better strategy.

Why can't competitors just copy it?

Consider the case for more technology risk. It's easy to say "even if this works, others will simply copy it" and sometimes that's true. But I am a big believer in early adoption not for the sake of it, but because there is a dividend that is often missed. In service markets (like strata management), the advantage isn't the technology itself, it's the culture and ways of working that grow around it, and those don't drag and drop. Think SpaceX v Boeing, where one rebuilt the assumptions about how rockets get made while the other kept refining old ones.

The same thesis sits behind Antlar. We're building AI-native in a market that will tell you it can all be copied or retrofitted to legacy software. Certain features can be copied. Ways of working are much harder, and once a business starts operating differently it begins seeing opportunities that aren't even on a competitor's radar. Those are our target customers.