Yesterday I wrote “The Transcript Was Never the Point,” and it’s driven some interesting commentary. Today, I want to go one step further because, as we broaden the scope, it’s obvious that everyone is watching the wrong race.
The conversation in tech circles, boardrooms, and venture portfolios has been locked on a single obsession: which large language model is winning. GPT vs. Gemini vs. Claude vs. the next challenger coming out of some research lab that nobody heard of six months ago. Or maybe it’s what’s big in Asia already. Bigger context windows. Faster inference. Better benchmarks.
That’s not the race that matters. The race that matters is what happens after the model thinks.
As LLMs and agentic AI tools continue their relentless forward march, the real value isn’t being created in the foundational model. It’s being created in the automation layer. In the workflows. In the outputs that actually touch a business, move a number, or eliminate a task that used to require three people and a Tuesday afternoon.
I’ve watched this pattern before. When the internet arrived via the World Wide Web (www), everyone argued about browsers (Netscape, Internet Explorer, Safari, Opera). When mobile took over, everyone argued about operating systems (Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, iOS, Android). The fortunes weren’t made in the argument. They were made in the applications built on top of whatever won.
AI is following the same script.
The companies building durable value right now aren’t the ones refining the base model. They’re the ones engineering the connective tissue. The agentic pipelines that pull data, reason about it, make a decision, execute an action, and report back, without a human in the loop for every step. The automations that wake up at 3 a.m. and finish the work before your team starts their coffee.
This is what enterprises are actually buying. Not access to intelligence. Access to outcomes.
The model is infrastructure. Necessary, yes. Foundational, absolutely. But infrastructure is a commodity play, and commodity plays compress margins. Automation is a leverage play, and leverage scales.
The smartest builders I’m seeing right now aren’t asking “which model is best?” They’re asking, “What workflow can we eliminate, accelerate, or make autonomous?” They’re stacking tools, connecting agents, and shipping outputs that their clients can point to.
That’s the conversation worth having.
Because in the end, nobody frames a benchmark on their wall. They frame the result.
And the result is always, always, always about what got done.
Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano, the marketing communications firm with more than four decades of startup exits across technology, telecommunications, and emerging platforms, and 24 years of sports marketing before it was cool