The Trust Moat: Why People Are Your Only Advantage

I read an article about AI-powered hackathons this week that crystallized something I’ve been saying for years: there are only three ways to win in business—better product, better price, or better people. I'm not just talking about software. I believe these three are true in any business. As is the rest of this post.

The hackathon article described teams building in a weekend what used to take months. Polished interfaces. Complex workflows. AI agents chaining tools together. From a purely technical standpoint, genuinely impressive.

And completely irrelevant.

The Commoditization Problem

Here’s what the hackathon judge didn’t say but clearly felt: every one of those impressive products could be replicated by another team in another weekend. Maybe faster—they’d learn from whatever the first team shipped.

This is the new reality. AI has commoditized software development. You can vibe-code a new product into existence at lightspeed. Ship it Monday. Watch it get copied by Tuesday. See ten variations by Friday. A hundred by end of month.

Software is just the start. AI will be coming for hardware soon. And then just about every other product design/creative industry. And then almost everything except 1. very hands on work and 2. work that requires licensing. Eventually those will be affected too, but robots aren't coming for another few years, and regulatory moats are real.

Some of those copycat teams will be better funded. Some will have better distribution. Some will just get lucky with timing. But none of them will struggle with the building part. That’s the easy part now.

So scratch “better product” off your moat list. If your only advantage is that you built something good, you’re already dead—you just don’t know it yet.

The Price Race to Zero

Want to compete on price? Good luck.

AI doesn’t just commoditize what you build—it commoditizes how much it costs to build. When a solo founder with Claude can ship what used to require a team of ten, labor costs collapse. When everyone’s costs collapse together, prices follow.

This isn’t a race you can win. There’s always someone willing to charge less. There’s always a VC-funded competitor willing to lose money longer. There’s always an open-source alternative that charges nothing.

Competing on price means competing on who can bleed slowest. That’s not a strategy. That’s a death spiral.

The Only Moat Left: Trust

So if products are commoditized and price competition is suicide, what’s left?

People. And specifically—trust.

Trust is the one thing AI can’t manufacture and competitors can’t copy. Trust is built through:

• Track record: Delivering what you promised, repeatedly, over time
• Reputation: What others say about you when you’re not in the room
• Relationships: The human connections that take years to build
• Accountability: Having a face and a name attached to promises

When everyone can build the same product at the same price, customers choose based on who they trust to support them when things break. Who they trust to still be around next year. Who they trust to prioritize their interests.

The Paradox of AI Trust

I’ve written before about the AI trust paradox—how we trust humans despite $50 billion in annual employee fraud, but demand perfect trustworthiness from AI systems that leave complete audit trails.

The same dynamic applies to companies. We don’t actually need to trust your product. Products are replaceable. We need to trust you.

This is why personal brands matter more than ever. Why founders doing founder-led sales outperform sophisticated sales teams. Why the companies winning in AI aren’t the ones with the best models—they’re the ones with the best relationships.

Anthropic didn’t win the enterprise market with Claude because Claude is definitively better than GPT-4. They won because enterprises trust Anthropic’s approach to safety. Because there are humans at Anthropic who’ve built relationships with enterprise buyers. Because when something goes wrong, there’s accountability.

And now, for me, Anthropic has blown that trust. They have been taking grey-actions to slow down competitive products being built on top of their models. More on this another time, but AI-powered 2026 doesn't have to accept companies acting like Monopoly-Microsoft 1998.

Building Your Trust Moat

So how do you build trust in an age of infinite AI copycats?

Ship and support publicly. Every problem you fix transparently, every thing you ship on schedule, every honest “we screwed up” post-mortem—these compound into trust. Your competitors who stay silent have nothing to compound.

Be a person, not a brand. Generic corporate messaging builds zero trust. A founder or leader who shares their thinking, admits uncertainty, and shows up consistently builds enormous trust. People trust people.

Play long games. The teams optimizing for quick wins will flame out. The teams building relationships for the long haul will still be here in five years. Trust accrues to survivors.

Deliver before you promise. In an AI world of infinite vaporware and demo videos, actually shipping something working is remarkable. Under-promise. Over-deliver. Repeat forever.

The Bottom Line

AI has flipped the competitive landscape. Building is no longer the hard part. Anyone can build. The hard part is getting people to believe in what you’ve built—and in you.

The 10-100 teams racing behind you, learning from the ground you paved? They can copy your features. They can undercut your price. They cannot copy the trust you’ve earned.

That’s your moat. Build it. And don't let it run dry.