Empowering a Global Consumer Tech Leader to Break Away from the Pack in the AI Race

The fast and furious advancement of AI is separating true category leaders from the rest of the pack. As the AI landscape develops, widens and matures, many players have moved beyond wide-ranging messaging and product strategies to focus on specific niches like distribution, power and output or reliability and safety. To win this race, organizations need to meaningfully differentiate their offerings and messages, which demands deep understanding of competitors’ positioning, marketing, messaging and actions in the marketplace — and how they can lean into key “must-win” spaces and stand out in the eyes of consumers.

Our client, a global consumer technology leader, partnered with Material to conduct an in-depth assessment of the AI landscape, analyze the emergence of new niche positioning and strategies among competitors, gain foresight into potential future landscape shifts and identify opportunities to differentiate and win. These insights would inform focus areas for marketing to separate themselves as a global leader in AI.

WHAT WE DID

Competitive and Market Intelligence

Market Strategy

APPROACH

We leveraged our AI-powered secondary research toolkit to analyze public statements, marketing copy, websites, product developments and other available information and articles to build an in-depth view of the AI category and its major players. We then performed in-depth analyses of our client’s competitors to reveal how they are repositioning their AI products to encroach on our client’s historical differentiators — threatening to claim its leadership position for themselves both in specific niches and across the entire AI landscape.

From those insights, we created a framework breaking down three vectors of AI — personalization, seamless integration and agentic proactivity — to show where competitors are operating and where there are opportunities for our client to strategically differentiate.

This informed the delivery of strategic recommendations for a clear, consumer-centric big picture vision for the client’s AI initiatives — grounded in how its infrastructure and strengths allow it to gain a richer understanding of user context and behavior, enabling more effective personalization and more useful AI products.

OUTCOMES

In the context of enormous shifts in the competitive landscape, Material’s team provided our client with a rich understanding of the current state of play, its opportunities for strategic differentiation and clear strategic recommendations to focus and position its AI initiatives for the future.

The work enabled our client to develop a clear, consumer-centric and differentiated big picture vision for what it means to leverage its key differentiator, the role and imperative of seamless integration and how to go beyond the task-focused nature of agentic AI.