For decades, we’ve been building a lie. We’ve been told that success is a checklist. The competitive edge is found in the next feature, the longer function list, and the more complex dashboard. We built software that did everything. We forgot to create software that knew anything. Look at your own product. Look at your competitors. They are piles of features—noise. And the customer? They are tired. They are drowning in the complexity that we told them they needed. That era is over. It’s time to stop chasing the checklist.
Your product is licensed for its functionality, but your customer stays for the insight. Right now, you are charging for the doing, but the market is hungry for the knowing. You are still selling the shovel, while your smartest competitors are selling the map. And the map is proprietary. It’s built on domain-specific data and advanced models. The shift is not technical; it is philosophical. We must admit that we have been fundamentally wrong about where value lies.
H&R Block realized that the core of their business wasn’t taxes; it was trust. And you can’t build trust while staring at a keyboard. The solution wasn’t adding more people. It was subtraction. They used a simple, elegant piece of technology—Microsoft Azure Form Recognizer—to eliminate the clutter. They taught the machine to see the chaos of the shoebox, the 100,000 fields of data, and instantly extract the signal.This wasn’t automation; it was enlightenment. By giving the men and women in their offices the power of intelligence, H&R Block achieved a profound shift. Data entry—the great time sink—was essentially eliminated. Professionals could access a complete, unified client history in seconds. Freed from the tedious task of typing, professionals could focus their time where it mattered: on the human story. They moved the conversation from “What are your numbers?” to “What are your needs?”. They built a solution that can instantly adapt to tax forms that change every year, creating an agile, scalable platform ready to classify over 30 million documents annually.[1]
Intelligence is the only true form of elegance. The value is no longer in the code you license, but the foresight you deliver. The market will soon refuse to pay for a tool that merely does a job. They will only pay a premium for the system that knows what to do before they do. The true product is not the application. It’s the insight. It’s the prediction. It’s the trust that comes from automation, not just assistance. It is the ability to simplify complexity down to a single, perfect action.
Imagine a future where your software doesn’t need a tutorial. It doesn’t need a manual. It simply understands. Market leaders charge for this deep understanding. Their core product is intelligence itself. Their competitive advantage isn’t a long list of features; it’s a proprietary vision of the customer’s future. We are no longer in the business of licensing functions. We are in the business of eliminating human effort through perfect foresight. We are in the business of selling trust. The new product is intelligent. The new currency is known. Start building it.
