Seize the Opportunities Before Your Competitors Do

Almost every AI guide opens with a threat. Not literally. But the structure is clear: act now or lose.

Seize the opportunities before your competitors do. The sentence appears on the first page of almost every technology guide of the past twenty years. Before, it said Cloud. Before that, Digitalization. Before that, E-Commerce. The subject changes. The fear stays.

FOMO. Fear of Missing Out. In marketing, it’s the most reliable tool. You don’t have to explain why something is good if people are afraid of missing it. The fear replaces the argument.

I wonder what it says about a technology when you have to sell it that way. When the first word isn’t: look what this can do. But: look what happens if you don’t.

Medications are sold that way. Insurance. Alarm systems. The message is always the same: the danger is already here. You just haven’t noticed it yet. And we have the solution. The sequence is no accident.

There’s a simple question I ask myself with every sales pitch: would this product also work if nobody was afraid? If the answer is no, then what’s being sold isn’t the product. It’s the fear.

After that, useful things follow. Use cases, processes, integrations. Some of it is practical. But the frame has been set. Anyone reading this kind of text reads it with a feeling that was created before the first paragraph. And that feeling is: I’m already too late.

People who think they’re too late don’t evaluate. They implement. They buy first and ask questions later. That’s not a bug. That’s the plan.

In thirty years of professional experience, I’ve been through every technology cycle. The patterns repeat. First the enthusiasm of the early adopters. Then the fear of the majority. Then the disappointment. Then, much later, the real adoption. Quiet. No hype. No threats.

The best technologies don’t need fear. They solve a problem you had before you knew a solution existed. You recognize it immediately. No pressure needed. No countdown.

AI can be many of those things. But not in the version that tells you: act now or die. That version doesn’t serve you. It serves the sender.

When someone wants to sell me something and the first sentence is a threat, I ask: what can you tell me that doesn’t require fear?

The answer to that would be the better opening.