Why the X Matters More Than Ever
When AI Commoditizes Optimization, Meaning Becomes the Moat
The companies winning next won’t have the best algorithms. They’ll be the ones who understood first that AI makes measurement cheap and meaning priceless.
Merit Beauty has released only fourteen products since launching in 2021.
In an industry built on constant launches, influencer cycles, and algorithmic virality, that restraint is radical. Every brand meeting could justify more SKUs, more TikTok challenges, more optimized engagement. The dashboards would all say yes.
Merit keeps saying no.
The company has built a loyal following not by out-optimizing competitors, but by creating coherence, calm, and intention in a beauty market obsessed with metrics.
That mindset, where metrics decide every move, has dominated the last two decades. If engagement was up, you shipped it. If conversion improved, you scaled it. If the dashboard was green, you called it success.
That logic is about to become worthless.
Not because measurement is wrong, but because AI is about to make measurement-driven optimization available to everyone.
And when everyone can optimize for the same metrics with the same AI-powered tools, measurement stops being a competitive advantage.
Meaning becomes the only moat that matters.
The Game Just Changed
Here’s what’s happening right now that most executives are missing:
AI can A/B test at infinite scale. It can personalize based on billions of data points. It can optimize every conversion funnel, analyze every customer interaction, predict every behavior pattern, generate every variant.
Within 18-24 months, every company will have access to tools that can:
Test thousands of variations simultaneously
Personalize every customer touchpoint in real-time
Optimize pricing dynamically based on individual willingness to pay
Generate content calibrated precisely to what drives clicks
Predict churn before it happens and intervene automatically
This isn’t speculation. The tools exist now. Adoption is the only lag.
Which means the competitive advantage of being “data-driven” or “metrics-obsessed” or “optimization-focused” disappears. That becomes table stakes. Everyone will be equally good at measurement-driven optimization because everyone will be using similar AI systems trained on similar patterns.
Just look at this chart showing AI adoption rates and growth:
So what becomes scarce?
What AI can’t replicate. What algorithms can’t optimize for. What no amount of data can create.
Genuine meaning derived from intentional integrity.
Not vague emotionality. Not brand purpose statements. Intentional integrity: the deliberate creation of experiences that feel honest, connected, and valuable across every interaction.
The Strategic Urgency of This Moment
I’ve spent two decades studying how markets transform. The pattern is consistent: Companies that recognize early signals, interpret what they mean, and act with calibrated speed before competitive windows close capture disproportionate value.
This is what I call Strategic Urgency.
Strategic Urgency is the ability to recognize early signals of opportunity, interpret what they mean for your specific business, and act with calibrated speed—fast enough to capture advantage, but aligned enough to avoid waste—before the window closes.
It’s not about moving faster. It’s about knowing when to move, how fast, and why now, based on the tempo of the market, not the rhythm of your internal planning cycles. Think of it as temporal intelligence for strategic decision-making. Where speed is raw motion, and velocity is motion with direction, Strategic Urgency is timed, contextual, and intentional action built on early signal recognition and fast-cycle interpretation.
The signals I’m about to show you aren’t predictions about a distant future. They’re early warnings about a transformation already underway. Most executives won’t see them for another 12-18 months. By then, the competitive advantage of acting early will be gone.
This is temporal intelligence in action: recognizing that AI’s commoditization of optimization isn’t coming. It’s here. And the companies that interpret this correctly and act with calibrated speed right now will build moats competitors can’t replicate.
Six Early Signals of the Meaning Economy
Right now, six predictive signals are converging around what I call “The X”—the experience layer that creates meaning. These aren’t trends. They’re market shifts already in motion.
Signal One: Customer Behavior Changes
High-value customers are increasingly choosing products based on how they feel, not how well they’re optimized. They’re abandoning perfectly functional platforms because the experience feels extractive. They’re paying premium prices for products that feel coherent. They’re evangelizing brands that feel meaningful.
This isn’t sentiment. It’s economic behavior. Discord grew to 200M users without an engagement algorithm. Linear is growing 3x year-over-year in project management because designers and engineers love using it. Notion took massive market share from legacy tools primarily through word-of-mouth about experience quality.
These companies didn’t out-optimize competitors. They out-meant them.
Signal Two: Platform Incentive Shifts
For two decades, platforms competed on who could optimize metrics better. Better targeting. Better personalization. Better engagement loops. Now we’re watching the first movers shift strategies.
Spotify invests billions in artist experiences and audio quality, not just recommendation algorithms. Apple positions privacy as a feature, sacrificing data collection that could improve optimization. Substack refuses to add an algorithmic feed despite pressure to increase engagement metrics.
Why? Because they see what’s coming. When everyone has AI-powered optimization, the differentiation moves to whether the experience means something to humans.
Signal Three: Talent Movement
The best product leaders, designers, and strategists are increasingly choosing or founding companies with a different North Star. Not “how do we optimize metrics?” but “how do we create meaningful experiences?”
When Brian Chesky said Airbnb killed performance marketing and focused on making the product “so good people tell their friends,” Wall Street panicked. Then Airbnb’s stock tripled. Not because he rejected measurement. Because he understood what AI would commoditize and what it wouldn’t.
The talent is reading signals the algorithms miss.
Signal Four: Capital Flow Patterns
Smart money is connecting the dots. Top-tier investors are backing founders who can articulate why their experience will remain differentiated even when everyone has access to the same AI optimization tools.
The question in pitch meetings is shifting from “what are your conversion metrics?” to “why would a human care about this in a way an algorithm can’t replicate?”
Signal Five: Cultural Momentum
There’s an exhaustion building. Not with technology. With being optimized against. People are tired of experiences designed to extract attention, data, money rather than provide value.
This isn’t anti-tech sentiment. It’s a sophisticated customer base that understands when they’re being manipulated by optimization algorithms versus when they’re experiencing something genuinely meaningful.
Signal Six: Dark Social Intelligence
The most important conversations about products happen where analytics can’t see them. Group chats. Private communities. Dinners. And what people are saying consistently: “I’m done with products that feel like they’re using me.”
This sentiment is building pressure. It will explode into visible market shifts. The companies that see it coming will capture disproportionate value.
Interpreting What These Signals Mean
Reading signals is only valuable if you interpret them correctly. Here’s what these six converging patterns tell us:
The interpretation: AI is about to make measurement-driven optimization available to everyone at near-zero cost. When that happens, optimization stops being a competitive advantage and becomes table stakes. The new basis of competition shifts to what AI can’t commoditize: intentional integrity in experience design.
Most executives will misinterpret these signals. They’ll see AI and think “this helps us optimize better.” They’re not wrong. But they’re missing the strategic implication.
When everyone can optimize equally well, optimization becomes worthless as differentiation.
Let me be precise about what I mean by meaning. I’m not talking about purpose statements or brand values plastered on websites.
I’m talking about intentional integrity—the deliberate creation of experiences that feel honest, connected, and valuable across every interaction.
Merit Beauty has intentional integrity. Fourteen products that work together. No product launches for the sake of launches. No jumping on every trend. The experience of interacting with Merit feels calm, considered, intentional.
AI can optimize individual touchpoints. It can personalize flows. It can A/B test variants. It can predict behaviors.
What AI cannot do is create meaning that feels genuine across an entire experience.
Here’s why:
Meaning requires intention. Not just optimization toward metrics, but deliberate choices about what matters even when the metrics don’t capture it. Merit could launch 40 more products and see revenue spike. They don’t, because integrity matters more.
Meaning requires consistency. Not just personalization, but a coherent philosophy that holds across every touchpoint even when individual optimization would suggest breaking it. Apple could add more features, more customization, more options. They don’t, because simplicity is the intention.
Meaning requires sacrifice. Saying no to metric improvements that violate the experience. Accepting lower short-term conversion for longer-term trust. Making choices that dashboards call wrong but humans call right.
Digital Age vs. Quantum Age: The Fundamental Shift
A few years ago at SXSW, I gave a talk called “Treacherous” about the myths breaking marketing. The most dangerous one: “It Can All Be Measured.”
I wasn’t arguing against measurement. I was warning about what happens when measurement becomes the only language we speak.
During my years building Zen Media and working with Fortune 500 clients like Chase, Verizon, and Microsoft, I saw this pattern repeatedly: Companies had mountains of data about customer behavior, conversion rates, engagement metrics. What they couldn’t measure? The moment a C-suite executive decided to take a meeting. The experience that made them trust a new vendor. The feeling that convinced them to recommend a solution internally.
Those unmeasurable moments drove millions in contract value. But because they didn’t show up on dashboards, companies acted like they didn’t exist.
I call this the shift from Digital Age thinking to Quantum Age thinking.
Digital Age: Optimize every touchpoint. A/B test everything. Let data drive decisions. More measurement equals better outcomes. If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count.
Quantum Age: Recognize that measurement changes what’s being measured. Understand that human experience exists in superposition, simultaneously rational and emotional, transactional and relational. Accept that the most valuable things resist quantification.
Here’s what makes this moment different: AI forces every company into Quantum Age thinking whether they’re ready or not.
Because when AI can handle all the measurement and optimization, the competitive question becomes: What are you optimizing for that actually matters to humans?
How AI Changes Everything About The X
Here’s the specific mechanism:
Before AI: Great experiences required craft, intuition, design talent, and expensive iteration. Most companies couldn’t afford to compete on experience quality. So they competed on features, pricing, distribution.
With AI: Every company can optimize flows, personalize touchpoints, predict behaviors, and improve metrics. The cost of good-enough optimization approaches zero.
The result: Experience quality stops being about technical optimization and becomes about philosophical clarity.
The questions that matter:
What do we value that metrics don’t capture?
What would we protect even if it hurt our dashboard?
What meaning are we trying to create that algorithms can’t?
How do we want humans to feel, not just behave?
Companies that can answer these questions and build accordingly will win. Companies still optimizing for dashboard metrics will find themselves competing against infinite AI-powered optimization from everyone else.
The moat isn’t better optimization. It’s knowing what to optimize for.
What The X Actually Is (And Why It’s Your Only Moat)
Let me be specific about “The X”—UX, CX, the entire experience layer.
The X is the coherent field of meaning that emerges when humans interact with what you’ve built.
It’s whether your product makes someone feel smart or stupid. Empowered or manipulated. Respected or resented. Seen or extracted from. Valued or used.
Consider companies that have built meaning-based moats AI can’t replicate:
Patagonia makes buying less convenient. Their “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign sacrificed revenue for meaning. An algorithm would never recommend this. Customers built a cult around it.
Apple charges premium prices for coherent experience. Every AI-powered competitor can replicate individual features faster. None can replicate how the whole thing feels.
Costco treats employees exceptionally well, sacrificing margin that could flow to optimization. Their customer loyalty is unmatched because the experience feels different from algorithmically-optimized retail.
Discord has 200M monthly active users with no engagement algorithm. They could increase time-on-platform with AI-powered feeds. They don’t, because the experience of NOT being manipulated is the whole point.
These aren’t companies that rejected measurement. They’re companies that understood what to measure for. And what to protect from measurement.
Acting With Calibrated Speed: What to Do Now
Strategic Urgency isn’t just about recognizing signals and interpreting them correctly. It’s about acting with calibrated speed—fast enough to capture advantage before the window closes, but aligned enough to avoid waste.
Here’s your framework for action:
See: Map where your current experience creates genuine meaning versus where it’s just optimized metrics. Ask customers: “Why do you actually use this?” Not what features. Not what benefits. What does it mean to them?
Most companies discover their dashboards measure everything except what customers actually value.
Interpret: Identify which parts of your experience AI will commoditize (probably most of your current competitive advantages) and which parts AI can’t replicate (the meaning layer).
Be honest. If your advantage is “we’re good at optimization,” you don’t have an advantage. You have 18 months before everyone is equally good at optimization.
Act: Make one brave decision to prioritize meaning over metrics. Kill a feature that drives engagement but creates resentment. Remove a dark pattern that improves conversion but violates trust. Simplify a flow that collects data but adds friction.
The tempo of this market shift demands action now. Not because panic helps, but because the companies that move first on meaning-based moats will establish positioning competitors can’t replicate with better algorithms.
This is calibrated speed: Not rushing into every AI trend, but moving decisively on the strategic implication that matters—meaning becomes the moat when optimization becomes free.
Why This Moment Is Different
Every few decades, the basis of competition fundamentally shifts.
In the industrial age, it was production capacity. In the information age, it was data access. In the digital age, it was optimization capability.
In the AI age, it’s meaning creation.
Not because meaning is new. Because AI makes everything else cheap.
When Ford pioneered the assembly line, companies that didn’t mechanize died. When Google pioneered search, companies that didn’t digitize died. When Facebook pioneered algorithmic feeds, companies that didn’t optimize died.
Now AI is pioneering automated optimization. Companies that compete only on optimization will die.
The companies that win will be those who understood first: AI doesn’t replace the need for human meaning. It makes human meaning the only thing worth competing on.
The Real Risk
Let me end with the uncomfortable truth shaped by two decades of watching market transitions:
The risk isn’t that you’ll over-index on meaning and hurt your metrics. AI will handle your metrics.
The risk is that you’ll keep optimizing for metrics while competitors are building meaning-based moats you can’t replicate with better algorithms.
Merit Beauty didn’t win by having better influencer campaigns or more optimized conversion funnels. They won by creating intentional integrity in a market drowning in optimization.
That logic works in every category. The AI-age winners won’t be those with the best algorithms. They’ll be those who understood that when algorithms can optimize anything, meaning is everything.
Your customers are already exhausted by algorithmically-optimized experiences. They’re desperate for products that feel meaningful rather than manipulated. And they’re willing to pay premium prices, evangelize, and forgive mistakes for companies that deliver it.
I promise you: Someone is building the AI-age equivalent of what Apple was in the digital age. Someone who understands that when algorithms can optimize everything, meaning is the only moat.
The question isn’t whether to prioritize The X.
It’s whether you’ll build your meaning-based moat before the window closes.
Because in a world where AI can optimize anything, genuine meaningful experience isn’t just a competitive advantage.
It’s the only competitive advantage that matters.
And the window to build it is closing fast.