Funds and boards keep asking a version of the same question: are we too late? History suggests the question is framed wrong. Being first matters less than being first to understand.
This article sets out what the research on market pioneers actually found, why racing to copy generic AI content is a first move in the wrong direction, and a practical, deliberately narrow sequence for the next 6 to 12 months. Opinions are labelled as Andrea d’Agostini’s view or Monarchy’s view.
01Timing: First to Understand Beats First to Copy
Funds and boards ask a version of the same question: are we too late?
History is less kind to pioneers than the folklore suggests. Golder and Tellis’s 1993 study of about 500 brands across 50 product categories found that market pioneers failed 47% of the time, that their mean market share was about 10%, and that early market leaders entered on average 13 years after the pioneers1. Markides and Geroski called the winning pattern the “fast second”: arrive after the pioneer, learn from its mistakes, scale what works.
Source: Golder & Tellis (1993) 1
Being late to copy is fine. Being late to understand is not.
02What to Do in the Next 6–12 Months
First 90 days: see clearly
- Ask the two-year question for every service you sell. The ones that fail are your DVDs.
- Run the metrics audit: label every board KPI human, machine or unknown. Stop paying for what you cannot verify.
- Run an agent visibility check: ask the major AI assistants about your category and record whether, and how, you appear.
- Run a consistency audit: list every place your business appears and fix mismatched prices, specs, policies and hours.
Months 3 to 6: build the base of the stack
- Write your structured truth: what you do, for whom, at what price or pricing logic, with what proof, and publish it consistently.
- Capture your best people’s knowledge in a form AI can learn from, not just a manual.
- Put a named human approver on every piece of AI-assisted work that reaches a customer.
- Pick one AI use case aimed at a specific, measurable problem. Measure its full cost and result.
Months 6 to 12: move from optimizing to evolving
- Rebalance budget from buying attention toward building preference: proof, owned channels, community.
- Pick one or two verticals you truly understand and favor models that are more resistant to AI.
- Move from fees toward ownership: take equity or revenue share where your work drives results, or launch or acquire a small business in your chosen vertical and run it with your team and agents.
- Keep learning at the source. Long interviews with the people building and studying AI will give you better questions about where your industry is going.
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Adapted from the Monarchy white paper “You are not talking to a human” (2026) by Andrea d’Agostini. Sources are listed below. Statements marked as views are opinions.
Sources
- Golder, P. N. and Tellis, G. J., “Pioneer Advantage: Marketing Logic or Marketing Legend?” Journal of Marketing Research 30(2), 1993. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224379303000203
