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Three AI moves to future proof your company
Early adopters won’t just gain an edge—they’ll set a new standard for delivering customer value.
The takeways
- AI is moving from efficiency tool to growth engine, enabling companies to reinvent what they sell, how they deliver it and how they compete.
- Three emerging models are gaining traction: scaling services without size, expanding personalisation and access, and managing capital with greater precision.
- Leaders should act now by redesigning customer journeys, deploying AI agents and building business models around new sources of value.
For years, most companies viewed artificial intelligence primarily as a way to save time and cut costs. But the game has changed. AI is now powerful enough—and strategic enough—to help businesses reinvent what they sell, how they deliver it and how they compete.
“We already know AI can help companies create better products and services while delivering highly personalised interactions more efficiently,” says Paul Blase, growth and reinvention strategy leader at PwC. “From a business model reinvention standpoint, there’s tremendous potential to generate new and different types of value.”
With the technology evolving rapidly, and with industry boundaries continuing to blur as a result, predicting every new AI-inspired business model is virtually impossible. An analysis by PwC, however, has identified a critical mass of activity around three types of AI-driven business models. Taken together, these categories represent the beginnings of a playbook for companies seeking to realise AI’s huge potential.
3 emerging, AI-driven business model categories
Scaling services, not size: services as software, agentic AI advisers, robotic service providers
Increasing product scope and access without complexity: mass customisation, reverse-auction marketplaces, autonomous delivery
Managing capital with greater precision: precision capital allocation-as-service, dynamic asset-monitoring utilities, talent on tap
The first category focuses on AI’s ability to help deliver and scale hyperpersonalised services, while reducing the cost per additional unit of service—without adding headcount. Companies that sell physical products can pair each offering with real-time, contextual AI services.
Meanwhile, companies that provide financial, health, legal or similar advisory services can use AI agents to help human advisers and customers while streamlining operations.
Blase sees an endless array of real-world applications playing out. “Restaurant chains can use AI to help evolve their menu to meet the needs of specific customer personas,” he says. “Companies that sell nutritional supplements can provide better interactions to help customers manage their outcomes, as well as offer clear advice about how their product fits into that overall solution.”
Using AI to create hyperpersonalised products and fulfillment processes like autonomous delivery—with few operational trade-offs—represents a second emerging category. “This is the mass customisation model,” Blase explains. “Companies can create greater value if they make something unique for an individual customer. AI helps to get specs from customers or use their data to anticipate what they need,” he says. “It can also help with flexible, smart manufacturing to create smaller batches of orders.”
CEOs reporting increased revenues through GenAI
Source: PwC’s 28th Annual Global CEO Survey.
AI can flip the script on traditional e-commerce dynamics, as consumers use it to broadcast what they want and are willing to pay, and sellers bid to win their business. “It’s a reverse-auction marketplace,” Blase says, “where consumers can, for example, tell their personal AI agent, ‘I’m planning a vacation, I have $10,000 to spend and I want to go to Italy for five days.’ Travel providers would then respond with a customised offer.”
The final category showcases AI’s ability to help companies better manage capital decisions related to financial assets, physical assets and talent. Businesses are using AI agents and real-time data to deploy resources more intelligently and fluidly. Freed from data bottlenecks, these companies can engage in faster adaptive decision-making. “Think of the massive amounts of engineering data coming off oil platforms every second,” Blase says. “There are so many permutations that have to be analysed to identify the imminent breakdown of a part. AI can help look at that data and identify patterns at a scale that just wasn’t possible before.”
A new mindset for leaders
What does it take to pivot to these models? Start with an organisational mindset shift, recommends Blase. “Imagine your fiercest competitor’s business has been built from the ground up with AI capabilities. It has venture capital and private equity behind it. Its employees are complemented by AI agents that help scale and add services and capabilities without adding people. That should change your mindset in terms of what’s needed to effectively compete.”
This shift, he explains, sets the foundation for a number of key strategic moves, starting with your customer journey: Map it out as if both your company and your customer are continually interacting through AI agents. Then turn to hyperpersonalisation, asking yourself which options drive the most value and increase customer satisfaction. Finally, look at which types of AI agents can complement major roles in your organisation—and which new agentic roles can add value within emerging business models.
For any company that wants to lead the next wave of growth, simply integrating AI into existing workflows won’t cut it. Fully commit to reimagining how you capture, create and deliver value through new AI-driven business models, Blase says.
“Some leaders realise their company might not continue to exist if they’re not a first mover. Others are in wait-and-see mode,” he says. “I would urge all of them to avoid being in a situation, five or 10 years from now, where they look back with regret that they didn’t act early enough. It’s time for a radical rethink.”
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Get in touch
Matthew Duffey
Global Business Model Reinvention Leader
PwC United States
Matt is a US principal with over 20 years of strategy and operations consulting experience in the technology, media, and telecommunications sectors.
Angelo Estrera
Asia Pacific Americas Reinvention Leader, Partner
PwC Australia
