Danish Chan.
Danish Chan, Co-Founder and Strategy Director, Untangld
"Don't play what's there. Play what's not there." — Miles Davis
AI plays what's there. And it does it better than most humans to be honest.
The problem is that's all it plays.
There's never been a better time to understand your customer. And yet, nobody seems to know what to build next. Innovation and new product development (NPD) across most categories is a race to the middle: shiny new things that look like everyone else's new shiny things.
Every CMO in the world now has access to the same superpower. They know who their customer is. What they buy. When they churn. What they click at 11pm when nobody's watching. AI has made customer understanding cheaper, faster and more abundant than at any point in history.
And it's made it completely worthless as a competitive advantage.
When everyone can see the same thing, nobody has an edge. You've just bought yourself a very expensive ticket to the same starting line as everybody else.
The brands that will own the next decade aren't the ones with the best data. They're the ones with the best questions.
Here's what happened.
Research used to be close. You'd follow real people as they shopped or sit in their house and talk to them about the thing they are actually thinking. The best insights were never in the answers. They were in the pauses. The contradictions. The moment someone said one thing while their face said something completely different.
That gap between what people say and what they actually feel is where every genuinely great brand idea has ever come from.
Then AI arrived. Shiny, fast, intoxicating. And we forgot about the in-between parts.
Now we have more answers than ever. Cleaner data. Faster feedback. All the right answers without any of the working. Because answers tell you what happened. They don't tell you why it matters. And the why has always lived in the messy, inefficient, deeply human act of actually paying attention to people.
But here's the problem nobody's talking about.
Every brand in your category is using the same tools. Trained on the same data. Producing the same outputs. Which means everyone is arriving at the same customer truth, at the same time, and calling it a competitive advantage.
It's not. It's a commodity.
Strategy used to be about seeing something others didn't. A privileged view. An asymmetry. You knew something about your customer that your competitor hadn't figured out yet. That gap was where you built.
Now the tools have democratised understanding to the point where there is no gap. Everyone's looking at the same dashboard. Everyone's optimising for the same person. Everyone's building toward the same future.
And then they wonder why everything in their category looks and feels exactly the same.
There's a word for markets where every player has access to the same information and makes the same rational decisions because of it.
Efficient.
Efficient markets don't produce breakthroughs. They produce incrementalism dressed up as innovation. They produce the same product with a different colour and a slightly better app.
Take Brompton. Every cycling brand had access to the same data. Cyclists wanted speed. Performance. Gear ratios and carbon frames. Brompton ignored all of it and got close enough to the city commuter to notice something far more human. That the last mile — from the train station to the office — was a daily source of low-grade misery nobody had bothered to design for. Not a cycling problem. Not even really a transport problem. A dignity problem.
The folding bike already existed. The insight was understanding who actually needed it and why.
Or Zipline. Every logistics company was optimising for the same customer. Urban. Connected. Already served by a dozen competing solutions. Zipline looked at the edges and found something the data had never captured because it had never thought to look there. Rural healthcare workers in Rwanda waiting days for blood supplies that were sitting in a warehouse they couldn't reach. The insight wasn't technological. It was about proximity to a population that didn't show up in anyone's market research because nobody had considered them a market.
One brand found its breakthrough in a train station. The other found it in a village. Neither found it in a dashboard.
So what does privileged insight actually look like in practice?
It starts with getting close. Not research-close. Uncomfortably close. The kind of close that doesn't fit into a methodology or a budget line. Someone senior enough to act on what they find, actually sitting with real people in real situations. Not watching a live feed from behind a one-way mirror. Not reading a debrief. Being there.
But closeness alone isn't enough. You need curiosity.
And not the performed kind that shows up in brand values decks. The genuine, slightly obsessive disposition to sit with a question long enough that it starts to reveal something uncomfortable. AI will always give you an answer. Curiosity makes you distrust the answer. Makes you pull on the thread that doesn't quite fit. The contradiction in what someone said versus what they did. The behaviour that the data captured but couldn't explain.
That's where the insight lives. In the unexplained.
And then you have to look at the edges. The middle of your market will never tell you anything interesting. It's too well documented, too well served, too comfortable. The edges are where you find the people who love you in ways you didn't design for. Who've hacked your product to solve a problem you didn't know existed. Who are furious at the category in ways nobody has bothered to listen to yet.
The middle of the market is where brands go to compete.
The edges are where they go to win.
Don't play the obvious notes. Hear the ones nobody else could.
That's where the next breakthrough will come from.
Not in the data, but in the sometimes awkward silences.
Everyone in your category has the same information. The same tools. The same picture of who your customer is and what they want.
The only question worth asking in that room is — what do we know that nobody else knows?
If you can't answer it, you don't have a strategy. You have a subscription.