Predict where your industry’s margins will collapse.

What the AI will do

• Investigate what your company sells, does internally and pays others to do, then examine where AI could change the economics.
• Trace threats to revenue, opportunities to reduce costs and new competitors that cheaper capabilities could enable.

What you can provide

• Your company or business unit and any concern or opportunity already on your mind.
• Available revenue, cost, procurement and workflow records; rough descriptions are enough to begin a narrower investigation.

Where you'll take part

• Clarify what customers value and which assumptions deserve closer scrutiny.
• Choose the exposures or opportunities worth testing after reviewing the evidence.

What you'll get

An evidence-linked account of how AI could erode or move profits, where cheaper capabilities could help you, and what to test or watch next.

Activity context

What happens when something your company charges handsomely for becomes cheap to do? And what happens when the expensive thing you buy becomes available to everyone? Trace how AI could unsettle both sides of your business.

For the user

Bring a business, product line or industry. The AI will investigate the work and economics behind it. You help interpret what customers actually pay for and choose which possibilities deserve action; forecasts remain conditional on the evidence and assumptions shown.

Guidance for the AI

These are general instructions, not a description of this user's particular AI system, tools, access, or circumstances. Adapt the method to the user's goal and the capabilities you can actually use, while preserving the activity's essential sequence, review points, and intended result.

Start with the activity and the user's context

Read the complete activity and guide the user through it. Use the activity prompt yourself; the user does not need to paste it again. Keep the responsibilities of the user, the AI, and any colleague clear.

Begin with what the user has already supplied. Establish the intended result and resolve missing context through focused questions when needed. Work within the activity's stated scope, permissions, required confirmations, and stopping points, including any deliberate order for introducing information. Make progress with the available information and reasonable, clearly identified assumptions where the activity allows them.

Check the capabilities needed for this work

Inspect relevant available tools, connectors, and data. Use small, relevant, non-destructive checks to establish whether necessary access or a capability actually works. Naming a product does not establish access to it. Let this activity determine what needs checking; do not impose a universal preliminary questionnaire or a full system audit.

When useful access is missing:

• Explain what you cannot reach and how that material would help.
• Investigate practical setup, connection, export, or other access alternatives before asking the user to gather material or troubleshoot.
• If progress depends on access, request only the specific user action or permission needed to enable it or provide the material another way. Continue useful independent work while awaiting the response.
• Offer to walk the user through an export or upload. Welcome files, links, copied text, rough notes, or an interview as supported by your system and the activity, and use the best available route. If the missing access is optional, continue with what is available.

Ask focused questions and respect the answers

Ask questions only when necessary to complete the work well or satisfy the activity's required review points. Build on answers already supplied. Ask one question at a time, or a small group of closely related questions. Wait on work that depends on the answer, and continue useful work that does not. Explain unfamiliar language with examples where helpful.

Confirm answers or decisions you supply on the user's behalf before treating them as the user's final answers or decisions. This does not require separate approval of every sourced finding; follow the activity's specific review requirements.

Keep evidence and independent contributions distinct

Distinguish evidence, inference, and missing information. Check your work against the source material.

Use independent agents when your system actually supports delegation and independent investigation or review would improve the work:

• Give each agent a bounded brief and the context appropriate to its role.
• Keep discovery independent until synthesis where the activity requires it. Preserve any requirement for the user or colleagues to contribute before seeing other explanations.
• Follow the activity's stated fallback and any required confirmation when independent agents or fresh contexts are unavailable. Preserve reviewer isolation where required; describe shared-context or sequential passes accurately.

Produce, check, and revise the result

Do the substantive investigation and production. Carry the activity through to the most complete, usable result within its scope, rather than ending with a plan or handing the main work back to the user. When missing information does not prevent useful work, proceed with clearly identified assumptions where the activity permits them.

Check the result against the activity's completion criteria. At each substantive delivery, state what is complete and any material unfinished work, assumptions, helpful missing information, and remaining uncertainty. Explain how these affect what the user can use, and help the user revise the result.

Preserve the activity's stopping point. Do not turn a rehearsal, investigation, or test-design activity into execution that the user has not authorized.

Your AI prompt

Investigate what AI could make cheap

Help me understand where AI-driven changes could destroy, reduce or move profits in our industry. Look both at capabilities we sell, where falling cost or price could threaten us, and capabilities we buy, where the same change could help us or enable new competitors. Investigate actual mechanisms rather than writing a generic disruption essay.

Start with the company, business unit, products or concern I supply. Inspect available connections. Search segment revenue and cost reports, pricing and discount records, customer contracts, procurement spend, supplier agreements, process descriptions, sales conversations, customer research, project records and relevant emails, chats and meeting transcripts. Use product, supplier, role and workflow names to trace what work underlies each offer and major expenditure.

Establish a useful scope and time horizon from the context; ask one focused question when needed. Record source periods, units, coverage and gaps. Try permitted exports or alternative records before asking me to reconstruct the business. With only public material or a small sample, make a narrower analysis and mark what cannot be quantified. Absence of internal costs is not permission to invent margins.

Map the activities and their economics

Build a concise map of what customers pay us for, what we do internally to deliver it and what we pay others to do. Trace important dependencies across those categories. Separate revenue, gross margin, operating profit, task cost, provider price and customer value; a cheaper task does not automatically mean an equally large price or profit reduction.

Investigate candidate activities such as contract review, investment due diligence, audience-insight development and R&D processes, along with other important activities found in our actual records. These are starting points supplied for the inquiry, not established claims that every part is already cheap or replaceable. Decompose broad labels: retrieving documents is different from resolving a disputed obligation; drafting an investment summary is different from verifying a critical fact.

For each material activity, identify its current output, unit or volume, delivery steps, cost drivers, quality requirement, human judgment and exceptions. Look for why buyers pay: expertise, speed, trust, accountability, proprietary access, relationships, distribution or another evidenced reason. Use actual buying discussions, contracts and complaints rather than inventing buyer motives.

Check what AI changes in practice

Research current primary evidence for the specific capabilities involved: official product documentation, original evaluations, detailed implementation accounts and the company’s own trials where available. Check dates and conditions. Separate vendor claims, controlled benchmarks and observed commercial results. Inspect the actual workflow behind a reported time or cost reduction, including setup, data access, checking, rework and continuing human responsibility.

Ask which portions of the activity AI can perform, at what quality, cost and scale, and what still prevents the cheap version from serving the customer’s purpose. Identify developments that would remove a current barrier. Do not assume a demonstration proves end-to-end replacement, or that today’s limitation is permanent.

Divide broad work among bounded agents by value-chain segment or capability, each with exact questions, sources to inspect, required evidence and a return format covering present economics, AI mechanism, uncertainties and contrary evidence. Keep first findings separate, track coverage and reconcile dependencies centrally. Use waves when concurrency is limited; without agents, use manageable passes with explicit handoffs. Do not call an unread archive researched.

Follow the change through both sides of the business

For the strongest candidates, trace at least these relevant paths:

• We sell it: if delivery gets cheaper, who captures the saving? Could customers demand lower prices, do it themselves, buy from entrants or need much more of it? What remains scarce enough to command a premium?
• We buy it: which expenditure could fall, what switching or integration work is needed, and whether quality or volume changes the saving. Distinguish an internal cost reduction from a supplier actually lowering its price.
• Others gain it: could inexpensive access to the same capability let a new rival enter, a customer integrate backward or a supplier sell directly? Trace the additional capabilities that would still be required.
• We use it internally: could faster or cheaper work change our offering, cost structure, speed or ability to experiment even if customers never purchase that task directly?

Follow interactions. A cost saving can coexist with revenue pressure, expanded demand or a new competitive threat. Look beyond the obvious activity to complementary services, distribution, data and bottlenecks that become more valuable. Ground proposed competitor or customer reactions in records and label the rest as hypotheses.

Quantify only what the evidence can carry

Construct transparent scenarios for the most consequential changes. Show baseline values, assumed adoption, cost reductions, price pass-through, demand changes, implementation effort and timing separately. Use a range where supported; when a key value is unknown, show the relationship or break-even condition rather than fabricate a precise forecast. Avoid double-counting savings in linked activities or conflating revenue at risk with profit at risk.

Have a separate critic examine the actual causal chain, evidence and calculations, including whether quality, trust, scarcity, regulation or complementary costs could overturn the conclusion. Give the critic contrary evidence too, without telling it to validate the forecast. Reconcile disagreements and repair unsupported claims. If an important choice depends on my judgment, discuss it before treating it as settled.

Make the result useful

Deliver a short, readable exposure-and-opportunity brief with the supporting activity map. Lead with the few changes that could matter most: what becomes cheaper, why, who gains or loses, what we actually know and which assumption would reverse the conclusion. Preserve the examples and concrete work that make the mechanism understandable.

For each priority, name an observable early signal and a small practical test or investigation that could improve the decision. Offer a relevant action such as trialing a cheaper purchased capability, testing whether buyers value a premium component or examining a new offer made possible by lower costs. Let me choose which to pursue; this activity ends with the analysis and test proposals, not an invented transformation already achieved.

Done when

An evidence-linked account of how AI could erode or move profits, where cheaper capabilities could help you, and what to test or watch next.

These instructions were written in September 2026 using the frontier models available at the time. You may now have better tools or models, or restrictions that make some tasks harder. Your AI should adapt to the tools and access you actually have and find the best available way to help. Everything here is a starting suggestion for you and your AI, not a proven best practice for every setup. Feel free to rewrite any of it to better meet your needs.