How AI Creates Competitive Advantage Beyond Productivity Gains

While generative AI initially grabbed the headlines, new AI technologies have continued to emerge, transforming how businesses operate, innovate and compete. The possibilities for building competitive advantage with AI are seemingly endless.

Early adopters of AI, such as healthcare and financial services companies, are achieving significant breakthroughs as organizations in other industries start to build momentum. Other businesses are leveraging agentic AI workflows in combination with the right data sources to do more with the same resources, improving operations and producing better outcomes. But over the long term, the strategic value of AI will be much more than simple productivity gains. Companies that use AI right will enable entirely new business models and market opportunities.

In the video clip below, industry experts look ahead to how companies will achieve competitive advantage with AI. Rick Villars, Group VP, Worldwide Research at IDC, believes it will involve developing strategies that incorporate all these ways of using AI to launch businesses in different sectors that will reach a new pool of potential customers.

Similar to the evolution of cloud computing, companies are adopting a hybrid approach as they develop strategies for deploying AI infrastructure. They’re relying on hyperscale platforms for large-scale compute and AI model training, and on colocation data centers to meet the requirements for their AI inference workloads globally. Once trained, companies are positioning their AI models at the edge, where they can perform inference securely and privately, while meeting data sovereignty requirements.

Additionally, deployment models for training and inference are evolving worldwide. For instance, hyperscalers have traditionally concentrated large-scale AI training hubs in remote locations in the U.S. Conversely, in the Asia-Pacific region, they’re positioning similar hubs in core markets such as Melbourne, Mumbai and Tokyo, due to favorable regulations, geopolitical conditions and economic efficiency. Simultaneously, there’s a shift toward deploying more AI inference infrastructure in key Asia-Pacific markets, accelerating time-to-market.

Jabez Tan, Head of Research at Structure Research, shares his observations on global AI deployment trends in the following video clip:

At Equinix, we support customers globally with distributed AI infrastructure that’s secure and compliant. To learn how Equinix Distributed AI™ is helping our customers accelerate AI innovation, read the solution brief.