Network Depot CEO Christopher Boyd recently wrote a Forbes Council Post that was shared exclusively with his fellow Forbes Business Council Members. This intriguing article is now available to Network Depot clients and interested readers. In the opinion piece, Boyd gives his insight about the true value of AI for organizations and advises business leaders to focus on utilizing the power of AI to improve their products and services.

Two probes are on their way to Jupiter, searching for life on two of her moons. In four years, they'll arrive and when they do, are they alone? Are we?

I sat with that one for a minute.

Three years from now, we return to the moon. Fifty-four years since our first footprint, we have our first road.

Two years from now, AI's power demand outgrows Earth. Datacenters are leaving the grid—bound to a life of orbit, where the sun's rays never sleep. Blue Origin already filed for 51,600 satellites. SpaceX filed for a million.

One year from now, a fleet of ships is scheduled to set sail for Mars—robots asleep on board, the first wave. They wake to a red horizon. Our first colony.

Today, a car pulls up to a curb with no driver—already happening a million times a week.

This is not a time to be calling AI a fad. This is the curve up—the future we're building Network Depot around.

Two ways to think about AI

If you want to get on the curve, there are two ways to think about using AI in a business.

The first is productivity. AI saves time. It writes the email faster, summarizes the meeting faster, drafts the report faster. It matters—but it's also where most of our conversations stop. Productivity gains are table stakes. Everyone will have them. Within a few years, this won't be a competitive advantage; it'll be a baseline.

Your people will be more efficient. Couldn't stop it if you wanted to. So what do they do with the extra bandwidth?

Here's where our thinking diverges. The second is value. Very simply: a company is a group of people gathered together to produce a good or service. One where the value of the output is greater than the cost of the inputs.

(Same inputs) + (Cost of AI) = (Higher output value) + (Higher output volume)

Read the left side and you drop from 20 employees to 18. Maybe 17. That's your ceiling. Read the right side and the products leaving your shop are so unrecognizable you'll have to rename them.

(Output value) × (Output volume) = Revenue

These are the variables for revenue and AI increases both of them. You're making more valuable stuff—and you can make a lot of it. Revenue is the biggest number in the room and you now have two levers on it. Two levers that multiply each other.

If you're a business owner, that's a needle-mover worth re-reading.

So OK, how do I make my stuff more valuable?

A real example

A national association issued an RFP. Our director of sales took our standard response, dropped it into Claude and asked it to restructure ours to mirror theirs—tool by tool, section by section. The result: a perfectly tailored, fully branded, client-specific response. It was honestly beautiful. With a few minutes of work, we were named a finalist and closed the deal. In onboarding, we discovered they were our biggest competitor's account. They're now our fourth-largest client.

We have responded to probably 50 RFPs over the past decade. Won exactly zero. So the delta isn't the productivity. The delta was the quality. This was a categorically better proposal.

The proposal itself was a better product. We produced something better, and the market responded.

From 5-star to 8-star

  • When you think about your business, what would make your product or service better?
  • The founder of Airbnb has a question he asks his teams: How would you turn your customer rating from a five-star to a six-star? What about a seven? What's an eight-star look like?
  • I'm paraphrasing, but if you're still thinking about your product from within yesterday's limits, you're already falling behind. Instead of asking, "How do we do the same work in less time?"—ask, "How do we deliver something of greater value? More polished, more tailored, more thorough, more client-focused—better engineered than we could have yesterday?"
  • The gap between where products and services are today compared to where they'll be in 18 months is the most important business variable most companies aren't talking to us about.
  • That's the delta. And the delta is where the value of AI lives.
  1. When you think about your business, what would make your product or service better?
  2. The founder of Airbnb has a question he asks his teams: How would you turn your customer rating from a five-star to a six-star? What about a seven? What's an eight-star look like?
  3. I'm paraphrasing, but if you're still thinking about your product from within yesterday's limits, you're already falling behind. Instead of asking, "How do we do the same work in less time?"—ask, "How do we deliver something of greater value? More polished, more tailored, more thorough, more client-focused—better engineered than we could have yesterday?"
  4. The gap between where products and services are today compared to where they'll be in 18 months is the most important business variable most companies aren't talking to us about.
  5. That's the delta. And the delta is where the value of AI lives.

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Asymmetric leverage

The delta has a name. What AI does to economics is called asymmetric leverage—and asymmetric leverage is what's driving the curve.

Symmetric leverage is what most business effort looks like. Work twice as hard, get twice as much output. Predictable. Linear. You get out what you put in.

Asymmetric is different. Small inputs, disproportionate outputs. Email costs $5 a month. A blip on the P&L. But come Monday morning, your company email goes down—panic is your first emotion.

AI will dwarf that. There will be those who use it, and those who use it with intention. Both gain leverage—but the ones who point it at their product will dwarf the rest.

The prediction

Three leaders are reading this. The one who points AI at productivity watches the curve. The one who points it at their product authors it. The one who resists begins extinction late 2027—or sells to a competitor who didn't.

Economists call it winner-take-most. Those who decide to make their product better—not faster, better—will expand their wedge until they're all that's left. They will have created a gap the competition can't sprint to close.

Here's what nobody is saying out loud: Your wedge only grows if you grow. Every survivor will have just gone through a revenue explosion. Of course they did, they pulled both levers.

Asymmetric leverage drives the curve. Value-driven companies author it. Winner-take-the-rest. That's the thesis.