Definition
Competitive moat
A structural advantage that makes it hard for competitors to take your customers, including network effects, switching costs, proprietary data, regulatory barriers, and ecosystem lock-in.
In the AI-native era, several traditional moats have eroded. Integration moats are weakening under the Model Context Protocol. Data moats still work when the data is proprietary.
The most durable modern moats tend to be quality-of-interpretation moats backed by workflow embedding: the tool makes a decision better, and it is where the work already happens.
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