When AI Commoditizes Everything, Context Is All You Have Left

In a new Forbes column, Alex Lazarow argues that fintech's traditional technology moats — better algorithms, faster APIs, smarter underwriting models — are eroding as foundation models become infrastructure and AI lets anyone clone a product experience in weeks.

Drawing on a conversation with Bruce Cleveland, author of Market Engineering and the operator who helped scale Siebel Systems from $2 million to $2 billion, Lazarow makes the case that the dominant fintechs of this era will be the ones that "engineer the market itself" — defining the category, owning the positioning, and embedding themselves in the buyer's decision-making process. When the tech layer is commoditized, what remains is context: regulatory expertise, customer workflow knowledge, distribution relationships, and cultural fluency.

The piece highlights Cleveland's portfolio company Parlay Finance, which built AI-powered loan intelligence for community banks and credit unions only after engaging more than 200 institutions to understand the operational reality of the $1.4 trillion small business lending market. It also points to the global neobank story — Tinkoff in Russia, Nubank in Brazil, Chime in the U.S. — to argue that local context, not Silicon Valley technology, decided each market.

The takeaway: founders should stop obsessing over features and start obsessing over context, and investors should ask not who was first, but who has the deepest context. In regulated industries where trust is hard-won, a well-contextualized fast follower will out-execute a first mover with shallow market knowledge nearly every time.

Read the full article on Forbes: When AI Commoditizes Everything, Context Is All You Have Left

‍