AI Multiplies. It Doesn't Rescue.

A QR sticker, a livestream comeback, a 162-year-old department store — and the one thing no new tool has ever changed.

At almost every hawker stall in Singapore there is a QR code — peeling at one corner, propped against the chilli sauce. The country spent years and real money getting those stickers onto the stalls. At many, the auntie still tilts her head toward the cash tin and pretends she hasn't seen your phone. The tool arrived. The habit didn't move.

That sticker is the AI debate in miniature. A powerful tool gets handed to everyone at once, and within a year the gap is no longer between those who have it and those who don't — almost everyone does — but between those who rebuilt around it and those who merely displayed it.

Every company now has an AI strategy, much as every company once had a social media strategy. The tool is never the advantage. What you were ready to do with it is.

Owning the tool isn't positioning around it

For most of retail history, a seller's reach was the length of their street — the pitch carried as far as the footfall and not a metre further. Then the broadcast button arrived, free, on a phone everyone already owned, and the obvious move was to point it at the same shop and hope a few more people wandered in.

Noppavit Prathampitak did the un-obvious thing. He had spent two decades running businesses — restaurants, property, a fabric trade — and when the fabric market collapsed and he hit, by his own account, rock bottom, he didn't reopen the shop louder. He looked at his own kitchen, started selling Indian groceries on Facebook Live, and rebuilt the whole operation around the stream: his son and niece running the channel, the broadcasts doubling as the storefront. Today "Uncle Hanji," as his customers call him, ships across Thailand to people who have never met him — Indian families, but also Thais and expats who would never have pushed open the door of a spice shop. The shop had a location. The stream had a country.

Investor Howard Marks's rule for markets fits cleanly: you cannot do exactly what everyone else does and expect to finish ahead of them. Every shopkeeper had the identical broadcast button. Uncle Hanji had the position. The shift didn't reward the sellers who went live — it rewarded the ones who rebuilt the work around going live.

Lip service is rational, which is why it's everywhere

Charlie Munger's most reliable instruction was: show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. Rebuilding a position is expensive, slow, and politically dangerous — you have to admit out loud that the old way was the bottleneck. Buying the tool is cheap, fast, and looks decisive in a board deck. An AI strategy is cheaper than an AI capability, and it photographs better.

If your rollout looks identical to your competitor's — same vendors, same demos, same untouched workflow underneath — you haven't bought an edge. You've bought a cost with nicer branding.

The position that wins is the one most likely to kill you

Robinsons had been the everything store of Singapore since 1858 — the grande dame of Orchard Road, the place your parents and grandparents shopped. It had positioned itself flawlessly around the dominant retail tool of its era: the large, well-located department store, anchored to the footfall of a prime address. That perfect fit was precisely the problem.

When shopping moved online, Robinsons did adopt the new tool — a revamped web store, a storefront on Lazada's LazMall. But it bolted the channel onto the old model rather than rebuilding around it, which is the retail equivalent of buying running shoes the week before a marathon you haven't trained for. Footfall, the thing the whole position depended on, kept falling: turnover slid from S$257 million in 2014 to S$154 million by 2018. In 2020, after 162 years, the last stores were wound up.

Nassim Taleb, author of Antifragile, has a point - the structures that look most solid are usually the most fragile to the one force they were never built to absorb. The prime-location department store was the most solid thing in Singapore retail, and the most exposed to a shift that made location irrelevant. Readiness isn't a destination — it's a tax you keep paying, and Robinsons stopped paying it a decade before it closed.

I have been repeating the following about complexity: the most solid-looking structures are usually the most fragile to the one force they were never built to absorb.
- Nassim Taleb

Where this gets uncomfortable

Here is the part that should bother anyone selling readiness as the whole answer. In Jakarta sits Tanah Abang, the largest textile market in Southeast Asia, where foot traffic fell by roughly half as livestream sellers undercut the stalls. The traders did not get ready, and they did not quietly die either. They organised. In October 2023, citing predatory pricing and the protection of millions of small merchants, Indonesia banned commerce on social media outright — and TikTok Shop, the country's fastest-growing channel, went dark overnight.

So readiness is not the only lever, and it may not even be the strongest. The unprepared incumbent has a move the textbooks leave out: change the rules so the tool can't be turned against them. An edge built on competence and an edge built on regulation look identical right up until the politics shift — and then they fail in completely different ways. One erodes slowly. The other vanishes in an afternoon.

Your move

So, back to the stall — which one are you?

The honest verdict, years on: most Singapore hawkers are on e-payment now, and the stalls that genuinely leaned in saw daily sales climb around 15 per cent. But the fee waivers keep getting extended to coax the holdouts, and the "Cash Only" signs are still there. The tool didn't fail and it didn't transform — it amplified exactly what each owner was ready for, and nothing they weren't.

Your AI rollout is the same experiment at scale: AI doesn't change what your organisation is; it multiplies it. Point a tidy machine at the wrong destination and it gets you there faster, in higher resolution, with better decks. Morgan Housel's argument in his book Same As Ever is that the most important things rarely change — and this one has outlasted every technological revolution: the tool arrives ready, and amplifies whatever it finds. Competence or not. And your certainty that you're one of the ready ones. From the inside, we can't tell which we are. The quarter can. So can the people who'd rather change the rules than lose to you.

So the only question worth your week: the "Cash Only" signs still hanging on your own stall — are they there because the tool failed you, or because you'd rather not find out what you are when it works?

Still in the game. — J