Everyone can build software now. The tools are extraordinary and getting better every quarter. A team of three people with the right AI tooling can ship in weeks what used to take a team of 30 a year to deliver. This is real, and it is happening across every industry I work in, from retail to healthcare to financial services.
The gap between the best digital products and the worst is getting wider. The barriers to building have collapsed, and the standard for what people will actually use and stay loyal to has gone up. When there are 20,000 versions of the same product, the features comparable, the interfaces similar, the subscription tiers nearly identical, what stops someone from using yours on Monday and switching to a competitor by Friday?
The answer, in every case I have seen, is coherence.
Coherence is the degree to which every part of an organization, its product, its people, its positioning, and its decisions move in the same direction at the same time. It operates above design and above brand, though it touches both. For the companies that are accelerating right now, coherence is the separating factor. Teams of three supersede teams of 3,000, because coherence is easier with a smaller group.
THE WRONG METRIC
Most of the conversation around AI in product development focuses on speed. Ship faster. Automate more. Reduce headcount. I walked the floor of a major AI conference recently. Nearly every booth was selling the same promise: Your workforce is the problem, and AI is the fix. The pitch varied in polish. The premise did not.
The premise: Building software was the hard part, and AI has made it easier. The premise is wrong. Building was always the easy part. Understanding what to build, for whom, and why they should care has always been the hard part, and it has gotten harder. Most executives I talk to know this already. They feel it in the gap between what their teams can produce and what their customers actually value.
When anyone can produce an app in 20 minutes, the question of whether that thing deserves to exist becomes the only question that matters. Can you create something of real caliber? A product with genuine domain intelligence, one that understands the people it serves deeply enough to earn their loyalty? Anyone can produce apps. Producing experiences people will actually want to use requires a different order of capability.
AI is extraordinary at intelligence: processing, pattern-finding, generating at remarkable speed. Insight, the ability to read people’s unarticulated needs, and instinct, the pattern recognition built through years of doing this work, remains human. The organizations with coherence use AI to amplify both. That amplification compounds when it serves the people building the product and the customers using it.
WHAT AGENTS READ
The coherence principle extends beyond how your team operates. Agents are becoming our new digital mediators. Customers increasingly interact with brands through AI agents that decide what to trust and which products to recommend.
An agent reads your product at a structural level. Is your data traversable? Are your systems consistent? Do they communicate what you actually offer, or something else entirely? An agent processes these questions in milliseconds before deciding whether to recommend you or route your customer to a competitor.
A brand with coherent product data and a coherent relationship between what it promises and what it delivers gets rewarded by agents and humans alike. A brand with a polished surface and a fragmented backend will lose. You cannot fake coherence for an agent. The agent will audit your entire digital presence in the time it takes a human to load your homepage.
3 QUESTIONS WORTH SITTING WITH
Coherence is concrete and testable. Three questions will tell you where your organization stands.
- If you asked 10 people across your organization what the single most important product priority is this year, would you get the same answer from all 10?
- When your customers interact with your product across three different touchpoints, does it feel like one company built all three?
- If an AI agent audited your entire digital presence tonight, what would it find?
Take the last five major product decisions your organization made. Trace each one back to the stated strategy. If more than two cannot connect to a clear strategic rationale, you have a coherence problem.
The features may ship and the product may function, but the experience will feel like it was made by five different companies, because functionally it was. The tools will keep getting faster. The advantage belongs to the organizations that know what to build and why it matters.
Peter Smart is CXO and managing partner of Fantasy.