Speed is the new moat

This weekend, robots ran a half marathon. Four of them broke the one-hour mark. The winner beat the human world record by seven minutes. Watch it. Last year's winning robot finished in 2:40. That's not incremental improvement, that's a different category of performance. The same thing is happening inside businesses right now.

The competitive advantage has shifted.

For decades, winning in grocery meant owning the right assets — distribution infrastructure, store footprints, proprietary systems. Hard to replicate, slow to change. Defensible.

AI is dismantling that logic. According to Rewired by McKinsey, the new competitive advantage isn't the asset. It's the speed at which you use it. The retailer with better logistics doesn't win. The one who rebuilds how logistics, inventory, and shelf replenishment work together from end to end does. That's a structural shift and not just an efficiency gain.

Why this isn't eCommerce

The industry has been through transformation before. eCommerce ate margin for years, and many retailers still haven't recovered from the investments they made chasing it. Reasonable to be skeptical of the next wave.

But eCommerce was simply a channel. It changed how product moved. AI changes how the business runs, impacting both demand and costs simultaneously. eCommerce pressured the bottom line. AI has the potential to rebuild it.

Speed compounds

Here's what McKinsey gets right that most AI conversations miss: each end-to-end workflow implementation makes the next one faster. The organization learns. The data improves. The measurement infrastructure is already in place. You're not starting over — you're accelerating.

And AI tools are themselves accelerating. Organizations that have made the foundational investment can adopt new capabilities faster than those still building the base. That's compounding velocity — not just faster, but faster at getting faster.

Think of it as first and second derivative. Most companies are managing the first. The ones pulling ahead are managing both.

"It is not just the velocity of the organization that improves — but also the acceleration."

The catch

None of this is cheap or fast to set up. You need clean, deep data. You need the right people.  It is not just a CTO and a team, but an organization that understands the tools and trusts the process. And the payoff starts to be felt in years two and three and has the potential to continue depending on how competitors react.

That's a hard sell to a board looking at quarterly margin pressure. But the alternative is worse: watching a competitor who made the investment run a race you can no longer keep pace with.

The robots broke the human record by seven minutes — and they're only getting faster.

Where to start

The entry point isn't a technology decision. It's an organizational one. Get leadership fluent in the tools — LLMs, agents, digital twins, agentic workflows. Then run a gap analysis: where is your data clean enough, your processes defined enough, your people ready enough to attempt an end-to-end reimagination?

Pick one workflow. Rebuild it completely. Measure it obsessively. Then repeat.

That's the race.