“Dude, I thought it over, and we realized that companies don’t really know much about logistics. And I mean the full circle, including reverse logistics. They think they know, but they don’t. And that’s where the opportunity lies.”
This came from someone who has already gone through —and successfully— sales, marketing, e-commerce, and digital. Someone who has scaled channels, opened new international markets, and experienced the pressure of growth and the fight for every point of profitability.
They’ve completed the full cycle and seen, from the inside, the real limitations of growth in companies where the ceiling isn’t about selling more, but operating better. It’s telling that a profile like this says it: even sales stars see it — this is about margins.
But it has always been about margins.
Mature Markets: The Revenue Battle Has Already Been Fought
The reality across most industries and geographies is that maturity is here to stay. Some sectors have long since walked the path to saturation.
“For years, the strategy focused (successfully) on identifying new segments, under-served micro-niches, or, more accurately, niches that weren’t optimally served. It’s marketing 101 — it had to be applied, and it was.”
The process was well defined: rigorous analysis, precise identification, building a surgical value proposition, and finally delivering a solution that, while addressing an already-satisfied need, did so better, faster, or more efficiently than competitors.
But protecting segments is almost impossible unless you can do it with a resource or solution that can be safeguarded —a patent, high barriers to entry, or any mechanism that blocks new competitors. Difficult.
Have We Reached a “Zero-Sum” Situation?
Double-digit organic growth, if it was ever the general rule, is now a chimera for most organizations. This scenario demands an honest reassessment of competitive dynamics, and above all, of the real levers of value.
We operate in fully mature markets, some directly saturated, where the room to grow no longer depends on discovering something new but on displacing someone already there.
It’s probably not said out loud because it’s hard to digest, but revenue growth is increasingly a zero-sum battle: if we earn more, someone else earns less, almost in the same proportion.
Artificial Intelligence: Another Turn of the Screw
AI isn’t a game-changing agent rewriting the laws of economic physics; it’s the latest —and most sophisticated, so far— turn of the screw in this marginal-efficiency dynamic. It would be naïve to think its massive application aims at anything other than process optimization.
Here, we need to strip away euphemisms. Applied technology —and all AI applications are applied when moving from tech to operations— focuses on process improvement. Marketing, yes, but with equal intensity in sales, HR, supply chain, or logistics.
“Every time we talk about ‘agents,’ advanced automation, or autonomous systems, we’re really saying something else with kinder words: substitution.”
Substitution of tasks first, functions next, and eventually entire positions. It’s not so much that people will work better or faster —that would be productivity, and some countries are already far ahead— but that much of the work that currently consumes X resources will simply require fewer.
Improving productivity through better conditions, tools, or organizational changes was a legitimate path for decades, but it’s no longer the main driver. Even if it were, it would have a ceiling.
The biggest opportunity is for some tasks to disappear from the equation: that’s clear. And that race is already underway. Again, margins.
The Real Playing Field
Looking back over the past 20 years across industries, a clear pattern emerges: each advance, optimization, and technological leap has ultimately reduced the marginal cost of producing, selling, or managing something.
First came economies of scale, then platforms, then basic automation, and now applied AI. And when marginal cost drops, it doesn’t open a new blue ocean. Not at all. What appears is, once again, the same set of players —with a few newcomers peeking in— fighting to maintain profitability in markets that all start to look the same.
The same mise en scène, just with different resources and tools.
That’s why talking about sustained organic growth sounds almost idealistic in many sectors. Not impossible, but extraordinarily difficult. The real game is about who can operate better, leaner, more automated, and with smarter application across the value chain.
Margins as an Uncomfortable Truth
In the end, it always comes back to margins. AI, far from ushering in a new romantic era of creativity (I almost laugh), will accelerate this dynamic: more cost pressure, more automation of low-value tasks, and less room for heavy, inefficient structures.
The discussion isn’t whether AI will create or destroy jobs —that conceptual battle is already exhausted— but how it will transform margins and which companies can remain competitive where every percentage point matters. Much of the corporate strategy of the coming years will play out in that tension —unless an unexpected crash blindsides us.
Convergence Is Inevitable
This dynamic leads to a final conclusion: a more than inevitable convergence.
The initial implementation of any new technology provides a differential efficiency advantage. Democratizing access turns sustainable competitive advantages into fleeting ones. What today is a margin of efficiency becomes tomorrow the cost of market entry.
If everyone has the same access to a technology, competitive advantage will always be temporary.
The hamster wheel cannot stop turning because corporate survival follows the same instinctive logic as in animals. We keep pedaling, not by inertia, but because stopping means falling behind.
And to keep the wheel moving, new stimuli are required: new applications, new improvements, and new layers of efficiency that allow continued competition.
