There is a player that did not exist a few years ago, or that had no name in your market yet, and that is now winning deals that used to go to the established players as a matter of course. You hear it from customers, you see it in tenders, you see it in the names now competing where that did not happen before. At the same time, part of your established competitors are visibly deploying AI: faster quotes, shorter response times, communication that feels personalized without an apparently larger team behind it. Two movements at once, and the question is whether it is one and the same movement or two separate things that happen to coincide.
The temptation is to sum it up as "AI is changing the market" and stop there. That is too crude to act on. There are several different causes that produce exactly this picture, and each of them asks something different of you.
The new entrant has no legacy to defend. A party starting today builds processes around what AI can already handle, without existing teams, systems, or habits that need to be accounted for. That is not a matter of being smarter; it is a matter of a clean slate. You recognize this when the entrant mainly wins on speed and accessibility, and less on depth or customization.
Part of your competitors have decoupled a dimension from headcount. Where delivery time, quoting speed, or after-sales service used to scale with the number of people you put on it, it now scales with what has been automated, with human oversight where needed. That changes who can win on that dimension: no longer necessarily the party with the largest headcount, but the party that has best organized the work behind that dimension for takeover by AI. This is not equally far along everywhere; some companies have this in good shape on one dimension and not yet on the rest, and that difference lies in where the work lends itself to full takeover, where oversight remains necessary for a reason, and where the work remains human work regardless of AI deployment.
Your own frame of reference may have shifted without you noticing. What was a strong delivery time five years ago may no longer be one now, not because you became slower, but because the standard shifted elsewhere. From the inside, that does not feel like decline; it feels like standing still while the environment moves.
It can also simply be a pricing or positioning story that has nothing to do with AI. New entrants do in fact more often gain ground via what it means when you suddenly see a competitor become cheaper than via AI-driven speed, and those two are difficult to distinguish with the naked eye without the underlying figures.
Within the same market you see companies that have already organized this and companies that have not. That difference rarely lies with the sector as a whole; it lies with which work within a company has already been split into the part a system can handle, the part that requires oversight with judgment, and the part that remains human work. A company that has made that split per task can grow a dimension without growing headcount. A company that has not yet done so remains bound on that dimension to the pace of its people, even though the technology is available. That explains why two comparable competitors can see the same AI offering on the market and respond to it in totally different ways.
You cannot conclude from this that the entrant uses AI, that your own deployment is lagging, or that the dimension on which you are losing is the same as the dimension on which the entrant is winning. What you can establish is whether the picture you have of your own strengths still matches how the market judges those dimensions today, and whether a loss of deals is related to losing deals on price while competitors are not cheaper or to something else you do not yet have in view. A series of quotes that go unanswered does not automatically point to AI at the competitor either; it can just as easily point to a shifted expectation on the customer's side.
If this touches on decisions about your own headcount, separate statutory requirements apply to that; that is not a conclusion that follows from a comparison between competitors.
The underlying question is not whether AI is changing your market, but which work in your own company can genuinely be taken over by AI, and that is answered per task by FTE TO AI's work scan. For the comparison with the entrant and the competitors visibly deploying AI, you can first establish where a lag on a dimension comes from and what can or cannot be done about it, and separately from that examine how you substantiate a claim about your own quality with evidence instead of with an impression. With the free dimension check you name where you think you are winning and see which of those claims can be defended with evidence; the full benchmark, with the evidence matrix per dimension, is under construction.