Agentize Everything. Lose Everything.

How to accidentally commoditize yourself - and not notice until it’s too late

Two people buy vegetables this weekend.

The first goes to the supermarket. It’s a masterpiece of mechanical efficiency. Fast, optimized, frictionless. The grocery list is on the app. The checkout requires no human interaction. No one talks to anyone. It works perfectly, as intended.

The second goes to the farmer’s market. It’s slower. More expensive. The vendor remembers them from last week, has set aside some grape tomatoes, and asks about the dinner party. It’s not just a transaction. It’s a mutual recognition with a commercial dimension.

Same product. Completely different competitive moat.

For years, SMBs have competed by exploiting the gap between those two models - they offered something more personal, more responsive, more human than the large-scale operators.

That gap was real. It was defensible. It was built on a layer of mechanical friction that large companies couldn’t fully eliminate.

AI is changing that game.

The Lesson from 30 Years of CRMs

Salesforce built a $200B empire on a simple premise: log everything, build a database, codify all your customer interactions. Then exploit that knowledge. But 30 years of CRM culture has proven that wrong for SMBs.

SMBs live and die at the mercy of their rainmakers.

They are not successful because they have the most complete CRM records. They are because their key people know things the CRM doesn’t.

What the client said over dinner, which had multiple meanings. The tension in the room that time when a deadline was missed. The real reason a deal almost fell apart.

That knowledge is fine-grained human judgment. It’s uncodifiable. It lives in the constant interaction and friction between humans, not between data points.

The farmer’s market vendor doesn’t have a CRM. They don’t need to. They don’t compete with the supermarkets.

The Agent Mirage

Every week or so, I have some version of the same conversation.

A video conversation or a coffee with a founder. They’re smart, and now they’re anxious. They’ve watched the AI wave permeate everything, and they don’t want to be left in the dust. The question is often some variant of: “How do I agentize my operations?”

It’s a perfectly reasonable question. It is also not the most important one.

The most important question is what happens to their business after they AND everyone else has “agentized”.

Because everyone is racing to leverage AI for efficiency. Automate the workflows. Deploy agents for anything that can be described as a playbook. Orchestrate. Save cost. Increase output. Improve margins. This is the lure of AI and, right now, the overwhelming urge for any modern executive.

But then what happens in a world where every company is equally efficient at the same products and services in their space?

AI-driven efficiency is not a competitive strategy. It’s operational hygiene.

It’s the 21st-century equivalent of having a website. You have to do it to remain relevant. You don’t do it to be different or to win.

When all your competitors deploy AI the same as you - and they will - the question that was always the most important comes back:

Underneath all this AI frenzy, what is your real moat? What is the unique value you offer?

And for a lot of SMBs, after AI, there’s a lot less there than they think.

The End of Your Moat

The supermarket chains will agentize. It’s how they continue to scale. The farmer’s market will not. Their value model is different.

Industrial and technology-based SMBs should take a lesson from the farmer’s market.

When you agentize your operations, you’re not just automating tasks. You’re codifying your company’s processes. Making them replicable at scale. Not just by you, but by anyone - including any better-capitalized competitor with more compute and a bigger token budget.

If your unique value lived in your process, and your process is now an agent, then you are now a commodity. You don’t have a moat anymore.

So here is what SMBs should ask themselves:

Is what makes us unique something that can be orchestrated as an interactive sequence of steps? Because that’s what agentic AI does. Sooner or later. And sooner than you think.

Mechanical efficiency is no longer a layer of competitive friction that SMBs can exploit. Technical complexity is no longer protection. Access to lower-cost labor, either. SMBs who are racing to agentize everything are accelerating their own irrelevance.

The supermarket will always "out-efficient" the farmer’s market on every mechanical dimension. Speed. Cost. Scale. Consistency. That battle is lost before it even starts. With AI, the gap becomes infinite.

So what's left?

The farmer’s market doesn’t compete with the supermarket. It renders the comparison irrelevant.

That’s the only move left.

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by Eric Raza | March 13, 2026

This is part two of a series on what survival looks like for SMBs in the age of AI, from my perspective. It is intentionally incisive. I welcome your view.

The next piece will go deeper into the paradox at the heart of all this: the inversion of scalability as a competitive weapon.