This article expands on ideas explored by Hilda Maalouf Melki, AI Expert Lebanon and Middle East, and Official Member of Forbes Business Development Council.
For years, artificial intelligence (AI) has largely been discussed through the language of efficiency. Organizations have focused on reducing costs, accelerating workflows, automating repetitive tasks, and improving productivity at scale. While these objectives remain important, they capture only part of AI’s real impact.
According to Hilda Maalouf Melki, AI Expert Lebanon and Middle East, AI does more than optimize existing business models. It is changing how organizations create, distribute, and monetize influence.
The companies that define the next decade may not be those producing the best products or controlling the largest infrastructures. Instead, they are likely to be the institutions that shape the environments where decisions are made. Increasingly, competitive advantage comes from influencing context before customers consciously finalize their choices.
Competitive Positioning Has Changed
Historically, companies achieved competitive dominance through scale. They produced efficiently, distributed aggressively, marketed persuasively, and optimized performance faster than competitors. Even the digital era largely accelerated this familiar logic. Systems became faster, more connected, and more accessible. However, companies did not fundamentally change how they created value.
AI changes that equation. It does not simply influence what a company does. Instead, it influences how customers think, prioritize, trust, consume, and commit financially within intelligent environments.
Moreover, recommendation engines anticipate intent before customers fully express it. Predictive interfaces personalize timing, visibility, communication, and engagement. Algorithms influence what people read, buy, trust, and respond to emotionally. In many cases, they shape decisions long before individuals recognize their influence.
As a result, organizations should not view AI as another technology layer added to existing operations. Instead, AI is becoming an influence infrastructure embedded within the economy itself.
Consequently, value no longer comes only from the product being sold. Increasingly, organizations create value through their ability to shape the environment surrounding the decision. This represents a fundamentally different form of economic power.
According to Hilda Maalouf Melki, AI Expert Lebanon and Middle East, many leadership teams still underestimate how quickly intelligent ecosystems are beginning to shape market behavior across industries.
This transformation is already visible in financial services. Banks historically competed through branch networks, balance-sheet strength, transaction volumes, and product diversification. While these factors remain relevant, they no longer determine competitive advantage on their own.
The institutions gaining an advantage today are not simply delivering financial products more efficiently. They are developing deeper visibility into customer behavior. They interpret spending patterns, risk perception, financial intent, and decision timing in increasingly predictive ways.
Similarly, retail is undergoing the same transition. For decades, retailers competed through inventory management, pricing, location, and distribution. Today, intelligent systems influence consumers much earlier in the buying journey. They shape product discovery, recommendations, urgency, trust, and emotional engagement long before a purchase occurs.
As Hilda Maalouf Melki, AI Expert Lebanon and Middle East, observes, the transaction itself becomes only the visible outcome of a much larger intelligence process operating continuously in the background.
