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When I think about the changes in the context for strategy across my career, my view contrasts starkly with the consensus view. Most obsess about rising VUCA (the combination of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) as the key change. I dontand I explain my position in this Playing to Win/Practitioner Insights (PTW/PI) called What has Changed the Most for Strategy: Implications for Your Strategy. And as always, you can find all the previous PTW/PI here. The VUCA narrative I started advising executives on strategy in 1981. The question I pondered for this piece is how has the context for strategy changed over the past 44 years? The general answer I get from observers is that the context for strategy has gotten more VUCA, a concept borrowed from military strategy, which adopted it in the late 1980s and has gotten ever more obsessed about it since. And that obsession has rubbed off on the business world. It is a bit like SWOT. The acronym rolls off the tongue and is very evocative. The narrative holds that as a strategist, you must recognize that you live in an increasingly VUCA world, so you must do SWOT analyses (ugh) and set out OKRs (double-ugh) to deal with that scary world. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/martin.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/Untitled-design-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Subscribe to Roger Martin\u0027s newsletter","dek":"Want to read more from Roger Martin? See his Substack at rogerlmartin.substack.com.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Sign Up","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/rogerlmartin.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#00b3f0","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91412496,"imageMobileId":91412493,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} I just dont buy the notion that the world generally, or specifically the business strategy world, has gotten more VUCA and wrote about it three years ago in this series. Perhaps my feeling is informed by the particular time I entered the business work world and my subsequent tenure in it. I graduated into my first full-time job from business school in 1981, when the economy was in the middle of the third year of by far the greatest three-year inflation (39%) since WWI (19161918). U.S. unemployment was well on the way to hitting 10.8% in December 1982, its highest rate by far since the Great Depression. The Federal Funds rate (the basis for all interest rates) crested over 19% as I graduated. Policymakers had to invent a new name for the combination of high unemployment with high inflationstagflationwhich my economics courses taught me was impossible. Suffice it to say, it was pretty damn VUCA. Neither governments nor businesses had a clue how to deal with itand simply made stuff up as they went along. Then we had the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and Desert Storm to followalong with another deep recession. Then we had the dotcom bubble and crash between 1999 and 2001, followed by 9-11 in 2001, followed by the global financial meltdown from 20082009, followed by the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I think it is impossible to argue that it has not been nonstop VUCA for the past (at least) 44 years. Honestly, I think the VUCA narrative is so popular because it makes a great excuse: We are doing badly because it has gotten so VUCA. While the breakdown of the Soviet Union is cited as the motivation for the U.S. War College adopting the VUCA narrative, my own belief is that it had as much to do with being outsmarted by the Viet Cong in the catastrophic Vietnam War that ended a decade earlier in 1975. Faced by the then-dominant U.S. doctrine of overwhelming air and technical superiority, the Viet Cong said no thanks and played an entirely different game, and won against what in the old game would have been an overwhelmingly superior force. But to rationalize the loss, the losing side saw it as a manifestation of this terrible new phenomenonVUCA. It is not dissimilar to competing against Microsoft in personal computer operating systems. No competitor has been able to dent its near monopolistic share. However, the true competitors changed the game and worked on making an alternative device the “computer” of choicei.e. the smartphone. In that more broadly defined game, Android is the big winner with a share 50% greater than Windowswhich probably felt pretty VUCA to Microsoft. Dominant winning strategies always have and always will create VUCA responses as if out of thin air. While the world simply hasnt gotten demonstrably more VUCA, two changes have generated the biggest impact on strategy over the time of my career: fixed/variable cost mix and price/value discovery. Fixed/variable cost mix Historically, and still as of 1981, variable costs dominated the cost structure of business (as I chronicled in this Harvard Business Review (HBR) article. Historically, companies were mainly factories (whether product or service factories) with a thin veneer of office tower overhead. The biggest proportion of costs varied with production and a tiny proportion were fixed. The auto industry is a perfect historical example. When the customer wants a car, the auto company must buy thousands of parts, assemble them, and physically deliver the producta whole lot of variable costs. But beginning in the 1960s, large companies started to get really big, growing revenues 5.3 times in real terms between 1960 and 2000huge growth. And they doubled again in real terms since. As they grew, they built up fixed costsin categories such as branding, R&D, and distributionin part because they became big enough to take advantage of scale economies in these fixed cost categories. As a result, cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) as a percentage of revenues has fallen dramatically since 1981 and the share of sales, general & administration (SGA) has grown similarly. That in turn has driven scale. If you dont spread your fixed costs over great volume, you are going to get out-invested by someone elseand then you are in trouble because your product wont be as advanced, wont be as branded, wont have the distribution. In this way, scale begets more scale. Indusries that have the lowest fixed costs (as a percentage of revenues) remain the most fragmented, as with the auto OEM industry that has been famously consolidating for decades yet the biggest player, Toyota, still has a mere 12% market share and the next highest is below 10%. Industries with highest fixed costslike software where variable costs are minisculeare consolidated or consolidating. For example, in cloud software services, three companiesAmazon, Microsoft, and Googlehave 63% market share. In smartphone operating systems, Android has 75%, iOS 24% and everybody else combines for 1%. Across sectors, this shift in fixed/variable cost has driven increased concentration, which I discussed in the HBR article above and is shown in various pieces of research including this University of Chicago study. Price/value discovery The second huge change impacting strategy is the dramatically increased speed and efficiency of price/value discovery. As of 1981, it was genuinely hard to compare prices and assess value of offerings, whether in B2C or B2B. Competitive prices were not easily available. You might need to go physically from store-to-store to compareand in many B2B businesses it was even harder. And to get accurate assessments of quality/value, you would need to subscribe to Consumer Reports or Car & Driver magazine and wait for the issue that dealt with the offering for which you were interested. In B2B, pioneer Gartner Group only came into existence in 1979. In B2C, if a seller could lure you into its physical location, it had a decent chance to sell you something without you knowing what it cost elsewhere or how the offering actually performed. In B2B, a salesman visited you to sell you person-to-person and use the relationship to get you to buyagain often without knowing competitive prices or performance. Obviously, it is completely different 44 years later. In most industries, there is ease and efficiency of price comparison. There is very little you buy today without knowing the price relative to competitive offerings. And there are endless customer reviews available to provide a (relatively) unbiased assessment of value. Price and value discovery happens instantly and cheaplya few clicks and you have what you need. Implications for strategy For me, there are three big implications for strategy of the intersection of these two fundamental changes. More deterministic Strategy has become more deterministic. With customers able to discover price and value quickly and efficiently, companies cant hide or obfuscate. Either you have invested more fixed costs wisely in making your product more appealing, or not. And that will determine results. Of course it isnt perfectly deterministic. Nothing in life isexcept death and taxes! But it is far more deterministic today than in 1981 when obfuscation was much more effective. Quicker to logical conclusion The path to a logical competitive conclusion is shorter. In 1981, mediocre companies could survive as viable entities for decades. It was a controversial statement for Jack Welch to say in his famous 1981 speech that GE would either be #1 or #2 in its industry or exit the business. That seemed overly extreme#3 or #4 players could be profitable for a long time, couldnt they? They could then but they cant now. If you cant find a Where-to-Play (WTP) in which you can put in place a How-to-Win (HTW), the clock is ticking fast for your demise. Winners get on an upward spiral of being able economically to invest more fixed costs in greater winning while losers get on a downward spiral of investments becoming unaffordableand these upward and downward spirals are happening quicker than ever before. Peakier Winners are winning bigger than they have ever before. As I discussed in the HBR article above, in 1978, the 100 most profitable firms earned 48% of the profits of all U.S. publicly traded companies combined, but by 2015 the figure was 84%. Even more narrowly the so-called Magnificent Seven (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Telsa) have been responsible for a huge proportion of stock market growth in recent years, as I have written about in this series earlier (though Telsa less so recently). While these winners are winning big, losers are losing bigwhether Rite-Aid, Tupperware, Silicon Valley Bank, Neiman Marcus, Spirit Airlines, etc. Practitioner insights The first insight is that strategy is more important than ever in this deterministic, speedy, and peaky business context. Please ignore the voices who argue that seeking competitive advantage is fruitless in this VUCA world. They are 180 degrees wrong, and their advice is deadly to your health. Pick a WTP in which you aim to create a matching and powerful HTW. Invest in that WTP/HTW combination quickly and aggressively. If your WTP is too broad and/or your investment is slow or tentative, someone else will be able to out-invest youand customers will figure that out fast. And when they do, it is a quick downward spiral for you. If you are investing energy and capital in activities without an intention of winning, you are fooling yourself. I hear it all the time: Roger, we cant exit that mediocre product line/business unit because our overall sales will shrink. They foolishly assume that their position in that mediocre business is stable. It isnt. It will be crushedquicker than ever. And it will continue to bleed investment resources away from product lines/businesses that have a chance of an upward spiral. Figure out a place to standand fight to win. Out-invest your competition. If you cant, you are fooling yourself. If you can, double down and take the fight to your competition. Encourage transparency in price/value discovery. Be like Progressive Insurance and show your competitors rates on your own website. If you are truly superior, the more transparency the better. It is the age of “killer apps” (which I mean metaphoricallyF-150 is a killer app). Few offerings will win and win big. Many offerings will lose and lose entirely. If your chances of creating a killer app while doing X things is A%, it will be >A% if you focus on doing .5X things. Simply, what has changed most in strategy is the diminished efficacy of throwing spaghetti at walls and playing-to-play. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/martin.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/09\/Untitled-design-1.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Subscribe to Roger Martin\u0027s newsletter","dek":"Want to read more from Roger Martin? Seehis Substack at rogerlmartin.substack.com.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Sign Up","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/rogerlmartin.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#00b3f0","text":"#000000","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#000000","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91412496,"imageMobileId":91412493,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
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Here’s a guide to the most notable features of the top AI chat apps. ChatGPT: Your Conversationalist iOS & Android Advanced Voice Mode is the ChatGPT apps most distinctive feature. Ask it to play a tough interviewer or a skeptical client as you prepare for a difficult conversation. Or have it ask questions to help you make a decision. Most of what you can do on your laptop you can do in the ChatGPT mobile app. Create an image. Ask for an infographic, a cartoon, or a photo illustration. See examples of seven ways I use these images. Ask for deep research. Get a detailed analysis with dozens of sources. See examples of nine ways I use this research. Study & learn. This new mode helps you strengthen your skills & knowledge. Analyze files or images. Turn a handwritten note into digital text, or make sense of any document, diagram, or manual. When I cant figure out how to assemble or operate something, this offers faster help than a Google search. Use integrated apps. You can now access Canva, Figma, Spotify, Expedia, and other tools inside ChatGPT. Try prompting for a graphic within ChatGPT while waiting in line with your phone, then edit it later in Canva. Pulse is ChatGPTs best new pro mobile feature. It creates customized notes for me every morning. The AI assistant synthesizes info from my chat history, my Google Calendar, and what Ive expressed an interest in learning. This mornings Pulse note, for example, included tactics for using new Substack features, Penguin stories for sharing with my daughter, and breakfast ideas I had asked about for my rice cooker and bread machine. These arent news updatestheyre personalized resources prepared by an AI assistant. I dont use or recommend relying on AI assistants for news searches, especially given AIs struggles with news accuracy. Caveat: Pulse isnt yet available for free accounts. Gemini: Your Creative Partner iOS & Android The Gemini app has five special features, in addition to its core chat capability. Nano Banana image generation model. Edit photos, blend multiple images, or design a poster. Worth trying: ask it to turn any image from your phone into a record album, book cover, or billboard poster. Deep Research. Generate exhaustive reports with citations whenever you need thorough background on an issue. Try this prompt: Create a stepbystep plan to adopt [tool/technology] in a team of [size]. Include costs, training time, changemanagement risks, and how to measure success. Cite case studies. See a few of my tips for strengthening deep research queries. Veo 3 video generation. Paid accounts only. Create 8-second clips with Veo 3.1, Googles new video model. Experiment: create a slick moving background for a slide. Canvas. Make an infographic, a quiz, or a simple game. Quick test: make a self-grading quiz to challenge yourself on something youre learning. Guided Learning. Put Gemini in teacher mode to help you gradually strengthen your understanding of anything. Try this: ask it to walk you through the history of any concept or tech youre curious about. When I choose Gemini: I use it as an alternative to ChatGPT and Claude when I want particular kinds of image edits and creative image designs. I also use it to experiment with generating short video clips, for guided learning, and for research reports. Claude: Your Mobile Studio iOS & Android Claudes app has a new voice mode I like. It waits for me to tap the screen to signal Im done, so it rarely cuts me off when I pause to thinkunlike ChatGPT, which often assumes Ive finished talking. You can choose from five voices. Create on the Go Create Artifactsinteractive little applicationsfrom your phone. You can make games, learning resources, document templates, or other useful mini programs. You can also now use Claude Code from your phone. What I most value about Claude is its excellent Projects feature, which lets me organize relevant documents and instructions for each distinct area of work. I use other tools (like ChatGPT, Gemini) for images and video, which Claude doesnt do, but I rely on Claude for assistance with alt-text, SEO text, project planning, and other tasks where understanding my context is crucial. Copilot: A Flexible Assistant iOS & Android Microsofts Copilot app is a good free option thats similar to ChatGPT and based on the same OpenAI models. One distinction is a new real talk mode that will sometimes challenge you. This helps address the sycophancy problem of AI chatbots blindly affirming your statements. Other useful features: Copilot can generate a podcast episode on any subject (like this one about Wonder Tools). It can also generate an image, run a deep research report, quiz you on a subject of your choice, and conduct a voice chat. Like ChatGPT, it can even help you understand something in your environment. Turn on your camera or load something onto your screen, then ask Copilot questions about something youre looking at. Ask it about fine print in a document, a confusing gadget, a troubled plant, or anything else. Perplexity: The Quick Researcher iOS & Android I rely on Perplexity for help understanding complex concepts. The mobile apps voice mode is especially useful for quick searching and getting a summarized response instead of a list of links. For niche searches, adjust Perplexitys settings to focus only on finance info, academic sources, or social sites for Reddit results. You can also use Perplexity to search your Outlook email or your Gmail and Google Calendar for messages on a particular subject. Tip: Turn on incognito mode in settings anytime youre searching on a sensitive or private subject. And as with all AI tools, avoid giving a thumbs up or down to a query because rating it signals that youre okay with it being read and analyzed. Read more about why I find Perplexity so useful Free & Low-Cost AI App Alternatives Locally AI iOS | Free Benefits: Free. No log-in required. Fully private. No data tracking. Easy to use. Getting started. Pick a compact open-source large language model suited for your phones processing power. I considered options from Qwen, Meta, and Google. Qwen 3 supports 100 languages and Metas Llama excels at summarization. I picked Gemma 3 QAT from Google. If youre a tech novice or dont care about those details, just pick Gemma as your model and youll be fine. Brief wait to get started. I had to keep the app open for about two minutes to download the language model to my phone. You only have to do that once. How I used it: I recently asked for a custom workout, given my constraints (no equipment, limited time) and personal fitness priorities. The result was helpful and similar to what I got from ChatGPT. Nice features Customize or personalize your responses by inputting a prompt that will guide the app across all the individual chats. You can explain your personal or professional circumstances, for instance, or your preferences for concise or detailed answers, or any other needs you have for how the AI responds to you. Set up Siri shortcut. You can activate Siri and say Hey Locally AI . . . to run a local AI search privately with your voice. Well-reviewed. People seem to like it: 4.8/5 average rating with 208 reviews. Vision tools. You can use this private AI app for text recognition, object recognition, or image comprehension. Thats useful if you want to use your phone privately to understand secure documents or convert personal handwritten notes into text. To get that benefit, within the app download the Qwen 2 VL model recommended for iPhone 15 or newer phones. Caveats Not the top models. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini perform better for image analysis than the small mobile models this app enables. Slow start. Expect to wait several minutes each time you download a new model, including the first time you use the app. No plug-ins. I couldnt connect this app to other services. Private LLM | iOS and Mac | $5 Nice features One purchase for iPhone, iPad and Mac. Family sharing means you can share the app with five family members for free. Choose from 60+ models. Lots of models available in this app arent options in Locally AI. That may not matter, unless youre eager to use a very specific model. Change AI models creativity level. Unlike Locally AI, this app allows you to adjust the temperature setting of your AI models to control how predictable or creative responses are. A model set to a low temperature sticks to more consistent, predictable answers, while one set to a higher temperature will generate more varied, imaginative replies. Caveats Single chat stream. You cant create multiple distinct chats in this app. Most other AI tools, including the Locally AI app, let you separate conversations into distinct threads for different subjects. No help picking models. Figuring out which one to try is tricky with this app. You can click a tiny information button that links to a separate Hugging Face web page about the model, but theres no easy-to-understand summary for novices. Locally AI has helpful concise summaries showing each models strengths. PocketPal AI | iOS and Android | Free Nice features Fully Private. No conversations, prompts, or data leave your device. Create custom pals. Set up multiple AI assistants or personalities, with different settings and system prompts. Access models from Hugging Face. Choose from many small AI models. Caveats May not work well on all Android phones. Depending on your phones age, the app might feel slow. A lot of Play Store reviewers reported this problem. Mediocre ratings. 4.1 out of 5 with 1,200 reviews is OK, but not stellar. The user interface lacks polish. The design isnt as elegant as what youll find on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, r other top-tier apps. But its free, and if the AI responses are useful, you may tolerate a lower-quality interface.
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Artificial intelligence company Stability AI mostly prevailed against Getty Images Tuesday in a British court battle over intellectual property. Seattle-based Getty had accused Stability AI of infringing its copyright and trademark by scraping 12 million images from its website, without permission, to train its popular image generator, Stable Diffusion. The closely followed case at Britains High Court was among the first in a wave of lawsuits involving generative AI as movie studios, authors, and artists challenged tech companies use of their works to train AI chatbots. Tech companies have long argued that fair use or fair dealing legal doctrines in the United States and United Kingdom allow them to train their AI systems on large troves of writings or images. Tuesday’s ruling provides some clarity but still leaves big unanswered questions over copyright and AI, experts said. According to the judges written ruling, Getty narrowly won its argument that Stability had infringed its trademark, but lost the rest of its case. Both sides claimed victory. This is a significant win for intellectual property owners, Getty Images said in a statement. Shares of Getty dipped 3% before the opening bell in the U.S. Stability, based in London, said it was pleased with the ruling. This final ruling ultimately resolves the copyright concerns that were the core issue, Stability’s General Counsel Christian Dowell said. Getty had accused Stability of both primary and secondary copyright infringement. Legal experts said the first one involves the act of reproducing something without permission similar to a dodgy factory churning out counterfeit Chanel handbags or pirated CDs while the second involves importing those copies from another country. In this case, Getty said Stability’s use of its image library to train and develop Stable Diffusions AI model amounted to breach of primary copyright. Stability responded that the case doesnt belong in the United Kingdom because the AI models training technically happened elsewhere, on computers run by U.S. tech giant Amazon. During the three-week trial in June, Getty dropped its primary copyright allegations, in a sign that it didn’t think they would succeed. But it still pursued the secondary infringement claims. Even if Stabilitys AI training happened outside the U.K., Getty said offering the Stable Diffusion service to British users amounted to importing unlawful copies of its images into the country. Justice Joanna Smith rejected Gettys claims, ruling that Stable Diffusions AI didnt infringe copyright because it doesnt store or reproduce any Copyright Works (and has never done so). Getty also sued for trademark infringement because its watermark appeared on some of the images generated by Stability’s chatbot. The judge sided with Getty but added that the case only partially succeeded, and that her findings are “both historic and extremely limited in scope.” While I have found instances of trademark infringement, I have been unable to determine that these were widespread,” she said. Experts said Gettys move to drop part of its copyright case means AI training is still in legal limbo. The decision leaves the U.K. without a meaningful verdict on the lawfulness of an AI models process of learning from copyright materials, said Iain Connor, an intellectual property partner at law firm Michelmores. Smith said there was “very real societal importance” in deciding how to strike a balance between the creative and tech industries. But she added that the court can only rule on the “diminished” case that remained and couldn’t consider issues that have been abandoned. A Getty spokeswoman declined to say whether there would be an appeal. Getty is also pursuing a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States against Stability. It originally sued in 2023 but refiled the case in a San Francisco federal court in August. The Getty lawsuits are among a slew of cases that highlight how the generative AI boom is fueling a clash between tech companies and creative industries. AI companies are now fighting more than 50 copyright lawsuits so many that a tech industry lobby group has called on President Donald Trump for help stop the court fights, saying they threaten AI innovation. Among the cases, Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by authors while a federal judge dismissed a similar lawsuit from 13 authors against Meta Platforms. Warner Bros. has sued Midjourney for copyright infringement, as have Disney and Universal in seperate lawsuits, alleging that its image generator creates copyrighted characters. Kelvin Chan, AP business writer AP Technology Writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.
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