You notice something about your competitor. A job posting that disappears, a delivery time that shortens, a team that's smaller than last year while revenue stays the same. The question that then comes up is not unreasonable: are they moving faster with AI than we are? The problem is that this question rarely comes back with a clean answer. What you see is an outcome, not a cause. And the cause is exactly what you need to know in order to determine whether you should act, or simply keep going as you are.
Publicly available information about a competitor consists of fragments: job titles on vacancy platforms, delivery times reported by customers, statements in an annual report, a single announcement about automation. Each fragment is true, but no single fragment tells you whether it concerns a task that AI can take over, a task with human oversight added on top, or work that remains human work and is simply organised differently. A shorter delivery time could be the result of a task that AI now largely handles. It could also be a reorganisation that has nothing to do with AI. From the outside, these two are difficult to distinguish.
On top of that, the question itself is often framed incorrectly. "Faster" is not a fixed point but a difference between two moving things: what is actually shifting in the sector, and what your own organisation has already picked up on. Anyone who only looks at the competitor misses half of the comparison.
A usable answer requires two pictures placed side by side. The first is external: what is happening in the sector, what regulation is changing, what competitive signals are publicly visible. The second is internal: what does the leadership team itself think, each member individually, about which tasks in the company are still human work and which now run with AI and oversight. These two pictures rarely match. Often one director still assesses a department as entirely manual, while another knows that a system has already been assisting there for six months. That difference, between what is happening outside and what the team itself thinks internally, is where the real information lies. Not in looking at the competitor in isolation.
The difference does not lie in ambition or budget. It lies in who owns the assumption. In companies where someone with a name and a job title is responsible for keeping an assumption about their own capacity up to date, a shift is noticed quickly: someone sees that a task that was still human work last year is now largely done with oversight, and reports that. In companies where no one guards that assumption, the old estimate simply stays in place until someone happens to stumble upon the difference. The latter is the common situation, not the exception — who guards the assumptions if no one owns them describes why this so often goes wrong.
A few things deserve to be stated plainly here. This approach does not produce a percentage showing how much faster or slower a competitor is moving. Such figures cannot be made reliable based on public sources, and a precise outcome would be a false sense of certainty. What the approach does provide is an indication of direction and of where the uncertainty is greatest: for tasks about which no public information exists, or about which your own team disagrees internally, the outcome is weak and should be treated as such.
An outcome also means nothing unless it is linked to a date. An assumption that was correct last year may already be outdated this quarter, precisely because AI advances unevenly per task and per sector. Without that date, every result is a snapshot that feels like a lasting fact — a mistake that how do you recognise that your plan rests on outdated figures explores further.
And a third limitation: this comparison concerns work, not people. It says something about which tasks can be taken over by AI, can partly run with oversight, or remain human work. What an employer does with that information regarding staff falls under their own statutory requirements and is up to the employer, not to this method.
When the external picture and the internal self-assessment are placed side by side, the result is not a judgement about the competitor, but a list of assumptions showing which ones still stand firm and which are beginning to wobble. That is a different conversation than "they are faster than we are". It is the conversation about which assumption in your own plan is based on a situation that no longer exists, and that is exactly the conversation a leadership team has when it wants to know how do I test whether our strategy still holds.
The underlying question — which work in this company can truly be taken over by AI, which work runs with oversight and which work remains human work — is answered task by task with the work scan from FTE TO AI.
You can start without waiting for the full proof, which is still under construction. The free assumption check is a short round in which you name your most important strategic assumptions and see, for each one, when it was last confirmed. This is not a judgement about the competitor and not advice on what you should do. It is a first look at what is already shifting in your own plan, while you look outward to see whether others are moving faster.
Stel uw vraag. Vaak zit de echte vraag een laag dieper — daar mag ik naar vragen.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.