What 900 Founders Taught Me About Growth in the AI Era

August gave me the chance to work with and speak to more than 900 founders, operators and startup leaders across three very different events.

The audiences were different. The settings were different. The stage of each company was different.

But one idea kept returning:

As AI makes it easier to create more, the advantage is shifting towards doing fewer things better — and being distinctly human.

That idea showed up in conversations about differentiation, focus, customer experience and the way founders are choosing to work. Here are the three lessons I am carrying forward.

1. Sustainable advantage is moving towards what is hard to copy

At the Australian Technologies Competition, I worked with Giles Bourne and Penelope Hills, who do a brilliant job showcasing Australian technology talent and helping ambitious founders take their ideas further.

I also had the opportunity to coach Jane Korneyko from Sova, King Arthur from AI Buyer, and Marcel Berger from Travel Activated. They are very different businesses, but each is tackling a real problem with serious ambition.

One of the strongest conversations across the group was about differentiation. If everyone has access to the same AI models, tools and increasingly similar capabilities, where does durable advantage come from?

The answers that kept emerging were proprietary data, unique distribution, hardware, genuinely agentic experiences, and high-touch human experiences that deliberately do not scale.

The more AI commoditises capability, the more valuable the hard-to-copy parts of a business become.

That is a useful test for any founder. If a competitor can reproduce the visible feature in a weekend, the feature is probably not the moat. The deeper question is what your company knows, reaches, delivers or makes people feel that would be difficult to reproduce.

2. Focus is a competitive advantage

Working with Lauren Calautti and the team at Scalare Partners, alongside Jane Oja and the team at UTS Startups, was a highlight of the month.

Across four weeks, I met founders ranging from first-time builders to grandparents creating their next chapter. The ages, industries and experience levels varied, but the attitude was remarkably consistent: they were willing to roll up their sleeves, test ideas and do the work.

The lesson that kept coming back was simple: focus on the one thing most likely to create the best short-term return.

Founders rarely suffer from a shortage of ideas. More often, too many ideas are competing for the same limited attention. A company tries to serve several audiences, solve several problems, package several offers and open several channels at once.

The better sequence is narrower:

• one audience
• one urgent problem
• one clear offer
• one channel where you can learn quickly

Get something working. Learn from it. Then build from the evidence.

Focus is not a lack of ambition. It is how ambition becomes testable.

3. Use AI to become more human, not less

The S2S Summit brought together more than 650 founders, investors and experts to explore what it takes to move from startup to scale-up. Bradley Delamare has grown the event into a genuine gathering point for the Australian startup ecosystem, and Kathryn Lawn did an exceptional job producing a day with a thousand moving pieces.

What interested me most was how much the AI conversation has shifted. Almost everyone is using more AI, but the response is not a desire to become less human. It is a renewed desire to become more human.

People talked about handwritten notes, deeper conversations, spending more time understanding customer problems, and creating experiences that customers actually remember.

AI slop is not a winning strategy.

The opportunity is to use AI for leverage behind the scenes while making the experience customers see more thoughtful, personal and useful. Let the tools reduce repetitive work. Keep judgment, curiosity, care and the meaningful moments close to the people you serve.

That may become one of the biggest competitive advantages of the AI era.

A practical operating system for growth

Three very different events produced three connected lessons:

1. Differentiate around what is hard to copy.
2. Focus your effort where it can create the biggest return.
3. Use AI to become more human, not less.

That feels like a pretty good operating system for growth right now.

It is also a useful way to review a company. What is genuinely distinctive? Where is attention being diluted? Which parts of the customer experience should become more personal as the underlying systems become more automated?

Continue the conversation

For a deeper discussion of these ideas:

Open the video directly on YouTube.

Elsewhere in Apollo this month:

• You're Not “Uncreative” — Here's How to Train Your Imagination explores how to strengthen imagination rather than outsource it.
• Stop Using AI Like Google and Start Using It as a Thinking Partner looks at a more deliberate way to work with AI.
• On The Growth Engine, Giles Bourne and I discuss what investors really want from founders in 2026: traction, clarity, resilience and the ability to adapt.
• Clarity° is now available with a free trial: five questions, five minutes and one clear focus.