Friction is the new distribution: AI erodes old moats, complexity becomes defensibility
vaibhavbetter · x · 2026-10-27
The author argues AI is rapidly eroding the moats businesses were built on in the pre-AI world, and "distribution" is being replaced by "friction" as the key defensibility.
What's hard for AI to replicate comes from domain-specific complexity: licenses, regulation and compliance, cross-border rules, messy workflows, fragmented stakeholders, and physical-world dependencies. Pre-AI, founders chased simple, scalable, frictionless businesses; now, a business without meaningful friction embedded in its problem is hard to defend.
The goal isn't to create friction, he notes, but to remove it for customers while building capabilities competitors can't easily replicate.
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