The business built for 2026 will not be enough for 2027

Most 2027 planning meetings will start the same way. What is the revenue target? Where can finance cut cost? Which functions can AI automate?

Sultan Bhatti maintains that one question must come first: what is the business building now that will still matter when every competitor has access to the same technology?

“Businesses have spent the last two years asking what AI can do for them,” says Sultan Bhatti, a Dubai-based marketing operator and subject matter expert who has worked across global sports properties, government-backed ecosystems and early-stage companies. “By 2027, that question will sound dated. Everyone will have the tools. The advantage is what gets built around them.”

That matters in the UAE, where adoption is moving beyond experimentation. PwC’s 2026 UAE CEO findings show 75 per cent of CEOs surveyed have a defined AI roadmap, and 85 per cent say their culture supports it. Technology is becoming infrastructure, and infrastructure rarely differentiates for long.

THE FOUR THINGS TO ESTABLISH

Bhatti advises establishing four things before setting another growth target.

1. A reason to exist that survives imitation. Products, content and technology are easier to reproduce than ever, making differentiation more commercial than philosophical. “If a competitor could copy the product, the pricing and most of the technology within twelve months, what would they still not have?” Sultan Bhatti asks. “That answer is probably closer to the actual business than the pitch deck is.” It could be distribution, trust, data, community or brand. But it has to be something.

2. An operating system, not a collection of tools. Buying AI software is easy; redesigning a company around it is not. PwC’s 2026 AI performance research found the biggest gainers were twice as likely to redesign workflows around AI rather than bolt tools onto old processes. “Putting AI into a bad process produces a faster bad process,” Bhatti explains. “The interesting businesses in 2027 will be those whose leaders decided which work humans should do, which machines should, and redesigned the company accordingly.”

3. Institutional knowledge that does not leave with people. Companies talk constantly about acquiring data but rarely capture what their own people know: why a launch worked, why a client left, what sales learned that never reached the CRM. “That information usually lives in somebody’s head, WhatsApp or laptop,” Bhatti notes. “Then the person leaves and the company pays to learn it again.”

4. The ability to change without starting again. Perhaps the least glamorous advantage. Markets, technology and customer expectations keep shifting; the answer cannot be an annual transformation project. “A business should not need a crisis before it becomes willing to change,” cautions Sultan Bhatti. “Adaptability has to become something the organisation knows how to do.”

THE AI QUESTION IS ACTUALLY A BUSINESS QUESTION

None of this argues for slowing adoption. Bhatti’s position is the opposite: adopt aggressively, automate what can be automated, and build proprietary systems where they create advantage. But access to technology is not advantage.

“If everyone can buy the same intelligence, intelligence stops being the moat.”

“What matters is what the organisation knows, how quickly it acts on that knowledge, and whether customers have a reason to choose it when competitors have the same tools,” says Sultan Bhatti.

The question for founders, CEOs and boards is not whether the business has adopted what is new, but whether it has established something difficult to replace.