I keep having the same conversation with owners and CEOs of companies that make real things and move real things. Trucking, property management, distribution, regional manufacturing. At some point one of them says, with no defensiveness at all, “we’re not a technology company.” And for most of my career I would have agreed with them.
In 2011, Marc Andreessen wrote that software was eating the world. For the middle market, he was wrong for fifteen years. Your company did fine. You bought software from vendors, hired an IT guy, and got on with the actual business. An ERP decision lasted a decade. The people who built the software carried the cost of building it, and you paid a subscription for the privilege of not caring how it worked. That was the correct strategy for a world where technology was expensive to make and slow to change.
That world ended somewhere in the last two years. Most people haven’t noticed yet, because the thing that ended it looks to most people like a chatbot.
AI Is an Accelerant for All Technology
When most business owners or executives think about AI, they think about a tool. Could it draft the proposals, could it clean up the books, could it answer the phones. That’s real, but it’s only part of the story.
The bigger version is that AI is an accelerant for every kind of technology, and we’re seeing it first in software because software is the easiest thing to accelerate. The cost of building software is dropping toward zero. Anyone paying attention can feel it: things that took a team a year now take one person (who knows what they’re doing) a week…and the person doesn’t have to be an engineer. I think hardware is next, because design, production, and supply chains are all processes, and compressing processes is exactly what AI is good at.
Put those together and you get a conclusion that has nothing to do with chatbots: technology, broadly speaking, is going to move faster every year from here. The implication of that is that the half-life of a technology decision will keep shrinking every single year. The ten-year ERP decision is now a three-year decision (at most), and the three-year decision is on its way to becoming an annual one.
That is the part that changes what kind of company you are.
Someone in Your Industry Is Going to Do This
Here’s my prediction: Every company, regardless of industry or size, is going to need to make technology a core competency to stay relevant and competitive. That used to be optional. As we move forward, it will stop being optional for a simple reason: if you don’t, one of your competitors will, and they will use the advantage on the three fronts that decide who wins in your market.
Imagine if one of your competitors leans in on technology… and not just AI tools, but the overall technology ecosystem. They start embracing the best tools from software to hardware that could allow them to rethink how they find customers, how they run the business, and how they differentiate themselves from others in the market (aka your company).
How they go to market. Maybe your competitor will build a sales team of AI Agents that can scale their GTM efforts overnight. We can build AI agents now that can make phone calls with voices that are almost impossible to distinguish from humans. Those agents can customize every outreach to a specific prospect based on deep research into everything about that company and the individual they are reaching out to.
How they run the business. The competitor whose operation is instrumented end to end, where the dispatch system, the billing system, and the customer system were built to fit the way they actually work, runs at a productivity you can’t match by working harder. Instead of lots of people in the back office, they have agentic systems that run accounting, IT, etc on auto-pilot for a fraction of the cost you spend for the same thing.
How they differentiate what they sell. This is the one almost nobody is thinking about. The competitor who changes what the customer receives and how they receive it, takes your customers on delight, and there’s no price you can cut to get them back. Maybe it’s faster turnaround, real visibility, or a service that used to be too expensive to offer.
My bet is that what decides who wins in every market will be who decided earlier that they were a technology company. And the advantage compounds, because every innovation your competitor implements makes the next one cheaper, so the gap gets wider each year you wait.
The Wrong Question
Almost every owner I talk to is asking some version of the same question: what do we do today that AI could do for us? It’s a reasonable question and it leads to reasonable answers. Automate the accounting, take cost out of the back office. That’s fine as a starting point, and I don’t fault anyone for it. But your competitors are asking the same question of the same tools, so whatever you gain gets competed away in a couple of years.
The question that actually changes the business is different: what does technology let us do now that we never could have done before?
Here’s what that looks like. I was talking with a property management company recently. The obvious conversation is about automating the back office, and we started there. Where we ended up was somewhere else. Physical sensors have gotten very cheap in the last few years… cheap enough that you could put one on almost everything in a building. Every HVAC unit, every trash can, every door, every water line. Hundreds or even thousands of them, all cheap, all durable. On their own that’s just noise. Point an AI system at all of those data points and you have a synthesized picture of the health of a building that nobody has ever had before. The HVAC unit has been vibrating a little more each week, so you schedule maintenance before it fails. The bathroom trash hasn’t been emptied in 24 hours, so a janitor gets dispatched before anyone complains. The owner gets a dashboard that lets them know, with real confidence, that their building is being properly managed. Then you connect an agent to all of it and the building starts managing itself: it calls the HVAC contractor, it dispatches the janitor, and nobody had to ask. In a few years the janitor may be a robot tied into the same platform.
That property management company is now a technology company, and a legacy competitor can’t even think about competing with it. All of that came from one question: what does technology, taken together and taken seriously, make possible for our customers?
It’s a Function, Not a Project
We’ve seen this movie before. The internet and the cloud were both sold as transformations. Every company that went through them ended up with either an internal IT department or an outside firm running their infrastructure, because the infrastructure needed running. The middle market mostly chose the outside firm, because they couldn’t hire the people. They’ll make the same choice with AI, for the same reason. You don’t “implement AI” and then you’re done. It’s a standing capability, and it drifts the day you stop tending it.
So you’re going to have a technology function whether you plan it or not. The open questions are whether you build it or retain it, and whether you make that decision before or after your best customer tells you what your competitor just showed them.
We believe every mature company is going to need to make technology a core functional area of the business, like finance or HR, to stay relevant and competitive. And unlike finance or HR, we think this one should be a profit center rather than a cost center. That belief is why Langham exists. We’re building Langham to be a long-term partner for companies that provides them with a technology leader who can help them determine their technology strategy across the business, and then can build, implement and manage their tech stack to ensure they’re always ahead of the competition. It’s a function, not a project.
You don’t have to retain us to act on this. But you do have to act on it. Make technology someone’s job at the top of the company, with a growth number attached to it, and ask them one question every quarter: what did we build this year that a competitor would have to copy?
If the answer is “nothing,” you now know exactly how much time you have. It’s however long it takes one competitor to answer differently.