The AI Race, and What It Means for Your Business
From ChatGPT's breakout moment to a full-blown AI race
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the way people explored the internet. Instead of typing keywords into a search bar, people could ask questions in plain language and get detailed answers. The same conversational interface also allowed for completely different things such as drafting documents or planning a vacation.
The AI race was on, and other players moved quickly. New companies like Anthropic and Perplexity launched their own models and large established players like Meta, Microsoft and Google committed billions to AI infrastructure. Sitting on the sidelines was simply not an option.
Of all the established companies, it seemed Google might be most disrupted by AI, since it made about 75% of its revenue from advertising. When users moved their questions to AI assistants, then that threatened their ad revenue. However, AI models have changed fast, and with Google’s Gemini 3 now outperforming GPT-5 on key benchmarks, Google has shifted from catch-up mode to being a serious contender.
For business owners, the AI models offered are only part of the story. The structure around those models is just as important: the hardware they run on, the cloud platforms that host them, and the business software that brings them into your daily work. AI capability is being pushed into your full digital ecosystem. As this happens, AI stops being a separate tool you try on the side. It becomes part of the core environment where your team communicates, stores information, and manages operations.
The five layers of the AI stack
To understand why these shifts matter, it helps to see how AI products actually work. There are five lawyers to the how AI is built and delivered to your team:
Layer 1 – Chip Design
At the bottom are processors built to handle AI workloads. Companies like NVIDIA design general-purpose chips; others, including Google, design their own. This layer sets limits on speed, capacity, and cost.
Layer 2 – Data Centres and Cloud
Above the chips are facilities housing thousands of servers. Providers like Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure rent this capacity to businesses. For most organisations, this is where AI becomes accessible.
Layer 3 – Foundational Models
These are the large language models such as GPT-5, Gemini 3 and Claude. They provide core capabilities like understanding questions and generating text.
Layer 4 – Products and Applications
On top of the models sit the tools your teams use: chatbots, writing assistants, meeting note-takers, and copilots built into existing software. AI shows up as features such as suggested replies, draft proposals, or automatic meeting summaries.
Layer 5 – Hardware and Devices
Phones and laptops have AI-enabled features, and there are new device categories such as AI-enabled glasses.
Some companies focus on one layer alone, such as NVIDIA. Others operate across multiple layers. Google is carving out a real competitive advantage by vertically integrating all five layers: it designs chips, runs its own cloud, builds models, ships products like Workspace and Android, and sells Pixel phones. This vertical integration allows it to tune each layer to work efficiently with the others, lowering costs and speeding up rollouts.
What this means for the tools you already use
AI is becoming invisible
The first change is that AI is moving into tools your team already knows. Email, calendars, documents, and spreadsheets now come with built-in assistance such as suggested replies, automatic summaries and draft text. The same pattern is appearing in line-of-business systems such as your task management, CRM and customer support tools. You might not buy "an AI product" directly. Instead, you upgrade a platform you already have, and AI arrives as part of the package. This changes how new AI capabilities enter your organisation, not as a separate tool but as part of the core environment where your team spends most of its time.
Consolidation is accelerating
As AI becomes tied to deeper layers of the stack, it reinforces the pull toward a small set of core platforms. Most mid-market organisations won't run five office suites, three clouds, and a dozen collaboration tools. They'll pick a primary environment and build around it.
Those platform choices have real consequences:
- They shape which AI features are available to your team.
- They define how well those features can access your existing data and workflows.
- They decide where your data lives, and under which security and compliance rules.
Making smart platform choices is important, because switching platforms will become harder over time. There is always a technical cost to switching, but more importantly, AI tools learn from your history: how your teams write, the documents you create, the patterns in your operations.
Practical questions to ask now
You don't need to track every model release. You do need a clearer view of how your current tools will evolve. Start with these questions:
1. Which platforms are we treating as long-term systems of record?
Think about email, documents, CRM, job management, and data storage. These are where AI will have the most impact.
2. How easily can AI features plug into our existing workflows and data?
Are your key systems integrated, or still siloed? If tools can't talk to each other, AI has less to work with.
3. Are we comfortable with where our data lives and how it powers AI?
This includes security and compliance, but also simple questions like who can access what.
4. Do we have a clear owner for AI-related decisions?
Someone who can connect technology, operations, and risk—rather than letting each department experiment in isolation.
Taking time to answer these questions now will make it easier to evaluate new features as they appear, and help you avoid a patchwork of disconnected tools that create more noise than value.
If you are rethinking your systems in light of AI, or simply want a clearer view of how these shifts may affect the tools you rely on, we are here to help. A short conversation can often surface the key decisions in front of you and give you a more confident path through the noise.
Do you have any questions on the above, or would you like to share your experience? Just email ideas@mawazo.ca or call +1 (833) 503-0807.
At Mawazo Marketing we work with owners of B2B companies who want to accelerate their business. We help them with a concrete digital growth plan, a website that saves operational cost, and a digital marketing system that generates leads. For qualifying clients we offer a 5x ROI guarantee: if we don't reach the objective, then we pay back the difference. Book a Free Strategy Session to find out more.
