By MATT JONES

Four Pillars Gin co-founder Matt Jones writes that, with the AI landscape moving rapidly, a risk lies in companies mistaking the race to adopt the technology as a strategy in itself. When everyone is using AI, what will remain distinctive is what one chooses to do with it.

Every month that goes by, the list of things AI is terrifyingly good at seems to grow.

For time-strapped and budget-poor leaders, the question is becoming less about whether AI matters and more about how to decide which AI priority to focus on first. And for many companies, their commitment to being the best at what they do in their category seems to have been replaced by simply trying to be the best at AI.

But that strikes me as a race only a handful of AI-first companies can ever win.

You know the FOMO is real when even the Deputy Prime Minister gets involved. Richard Marles is off to the US this week and AI is high on his agenda. According to Marles, getting this AI moment right for Australia represents the most critical moment for national self-reliance since World War II. And you thought your board’s scrutiny of your AI plans was tough.

The AI landscape is moving extraordinarily quickly, and there will inevitably be companies that move late and find themselves on the wrong side of the changes it brings.

But there’s another risk in moments like this.

When a technology becomes important and high-profile enough, the race to adopt it can start masquerading as strategy. The question shifts from ‘what problem are we trying to solve?’ to ‘how quickly can we do something, anything, with AI?’. Which brings me, somewhat reluctantly, to the second coming of brand purpose.

The fall of purpose

Yes, I know. ‘Purpose’ is a triggering word for survivors of the brand purpose wars of recent years. For a while, thanks in part to Simon Sinek and his useful but simplistic golden circle, brands didn’t merely make things or solve problems. They started with why. They stood for something. They were on a journey and inviting you to join them. Shampoo wanted to empower you, banks wanted to enable human flourishing and companies making sugary soft drinks proudly shared their peppy visions for social harmony-maxxing.

The backlash was deserved. Mark Ritson and others spent years attacking the assumption that consumers needed the brands in their lives to possess some higher-order social purpose. Somewhere along the way, purpose had become shorthand for corporate virtue, usually expressed in advertising and bearing only a passing relationship to what the company actually did. It rarely meant anything or cost the company anything, all of which demonstrated it barely existed at all. The pity is that, in the process, we discredited a useful idea.

Purpose, at its best, was never about giving customers another reason to admire a brand. It was an internal tool for market orientation. It forced a business to stop staring lovingly at the product it wanted to sell and look instead at the people it hoped might buy it. Why does this thing need to exist in their lives? What problem does it solve? Why does that problem matter? Purpose, used correctly, helped shift the conversation from ‘what do we want to sell?’ to ‘why does anyone need us to exist?’

It’s not about you

This is how we used purpose at Four Pillars Gin. We wrote our purpose statement a year before we launched our first gin and never changed it. But we also never banged on to consumers or bartenders about it. It simply helped us make better, more focused decisions and kept us on course as growth, change and opportunity all inevitably tempted us with their various distractions.

For me, that’s always been the power of the ‘why’ question at the heart of purpose. Why will anyone care? Why would anyone mourn your business if you shut your doors tomorrow? These questions direct a company’s attention up from its own navel and out towards its customers.

Over time, organisations naturally become fascinated by their own capabilities and priorities. When you spend years developing a product, it’s understandable that the product becomes the centre of your universe. AI now gives us a bold new remix of that same old song. The inward-looking product obsessions of the past are becoming the inward-looking technology obsessions of the present. What can AI do for us? How many processes can we automate? Can we put an AI button on this before the investor presentation next week?

Leading with purpose helps to turn the telescope around and ask more meaningful questions. What problems do our customers rely on us to solve? Why do we matter to them? How is that changing? How can AI help us matter even more to them in the future? Will AI make the experience of working with us better, or is our obsession with AI at risk of distracting us from why we really exist?

The Canva case study

Consider Canva, much in the news last week after its valuation took a hit. Its original purpose was unusually easy to understand: democratise design. Take something that had largely required specialist skills and complicated professional software and make it accessible to almost anyone. That clarity helped turn an Australian start-up into one of the country’s great technology success stories.

Now Canva finds itself in the middle of an AI arms race. Its recent AI Vision event in Sydney showcased its own increasingly sophisticated AI capabilities alongside platform collaborators who may soon become competitors. OpenAI, Anthropic and others all sat on Canva’s impressive stage while simultaneously working to expand what ordinary people can create without the need for specialist tools like, well, Canva.

It would be foolish to conclude that Canva has somehow got AI wrong. It is investing heavily and has explicitly framed that investment around empowering people to design and create. But there is a strategic danger in accepting that the contest is now simply about whose AI is best. What happens if the great flattening takes place and the power of your AI model quickly becomes table stakes? Does the question then shift back to who has the best design workflow platform?

If Canva’s purpose remains democratising design for everyone from solopreneurs and students to enterprise teams, it doesn’t necessarily need to beat frontier AI companies at their own game. Perhaps it simply needs to use whatever technology is most relevant to deliver a design experience that is better than anyone else’s and be the world’s best place to manage design end-to-end, not just have the whizziest AI for bits of the process.

AI is not a strategy

Salesforce offers another timely example. News of the much-heralded “SaaS-pocalypse” has, for now at least, been exaggerated. Salesforce has reported record quarterly revenue and pointed to strong growth from Agentforce, its agentic AI offering. For decades,

Salesforce has operated around automating customer relationships, sales, service, data and the workflows connecting them. AI changes what Salesforce can do inside that world, potentially dramatically, but the centre of gravity remains recognisable. It has given Salesforce a new way to pursue and amplify the exact business it was already in.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a smaller scale. Back in simpler times, businesses wanted a digital strategy, then a mobile strategy, before realising that nobody actually needed a mobile strategy. They just needed an overall business strategy that still made sense once every customer had a computer in their pocket.

AI is arguably broader and even more consequential than any of those shifts, but the tension is the same. And if AI develops anything like its advocates expect, being good at AI may eventually cease to be much of a differentiator anyway. Powerful models, agents and automation will become increasingly available to everyone. Saying your company “uses AI” could become about as revealing as announcing that your employees have email addresses.

Purpose matters for what it does

What will remain distinctive is what you choose to do with it. And that choice requires clarity about the business you’re actually in. The second coming of purpose doesn’t require another generation of lofty manifestos or brands explaining how they’re changing the world.

We’ve had quite enough of that. The great irony is that we spent years arguing about whether customers cared about our purpose. That was never really the point. Purpose mattered because it forced businesses to care more about their customers: to look beyond the thing they made and understand why it mattered in somebody else’s life.

AI makes that discipline useful all over again. When every organisation is asking how much AI it can deploy and how quickly, the more interesting questions remain stubbornly human: why do we exist, why do we matter to the people we serve, and can this extraordinary new technology help us matter to them even more?

Feature image credit: Cliff Obrecht, Melanie Perkins and and Cameron Adams at Canva Create 2026

By MATT JONES

Matt Jones has an eclectic background, combining economics, politics, brand experience and gin. To read more, see the biographical note at the end of his first column for Mumbrella on why SXSW Sydney failed.

Sourced from Mumbrella