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For most of my career, I thought of the software and systems my teams built as the asset. The complexity was the protection. It took years to build, deep domain knowledge to maintain, and serious investment to replicate. That was the moat.
Richard Spitz, Managing Director of Strong Force Innovation Portfolios, pushed back on that framing — and I’ve been thinking about it ever since.
“AI is rapidly reducing the scarcity value of software development. Products, features, and workflows that once required large teams and years to build can now be created, replicated, and improved much faster. That doesn’t eliminate the value of software — it changes where durable value resides. Competitive advantage moves away from code alone and toward the architecture that controls how AI operates inside the business. Companies that deploy the same models and tools as everyone else risk becoming a more efficient version of the same commodity.”
I’ve watched this happen in real time. Salesforce — one of the most valuable software companies ever built — was effectively commoditized within months once AI models could replicate what its software did. Twelve million lines of code, rebuilt over a weekend at a fraction of the size, running faster and cheaper. That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what happened.
Owning code was never true intellectual property protection. It was a head start. AI just collapsed how long that head start lasts.
Patents are a fundamentally different kind of asset. They don’t depend on staying ahead. They don’t erode as competitors get faster. They create a property right in the architecture itself — one that applies even when a competitor builds the same thing entirely independently.
Strong Force has spent years writing patents at exactly this layer: not on individual products or features, but on the control architecture through which AI operates inside an enterprise. How it accesses data. How it applies proprietary context. How agents are authorized. How outcomes are audited. That architecture is the same regardless of which model is running, which vendor is involved, or which application is on top.
Richard put the scale of it simply: approximately a thousand patent assets today, averaging around four hundred fifty pages per application — and they’ve only claimed a small percentage of what could be claimed, with the portfolio on track to reach ten thousand patents with the right opportunities.
SO, HERE’S WHAT I’M TELLING YOU
Code stopped being the moat — the architecture wrapped around the AI is the new one.
The businesses that understand this shift early have a window. The architecture layer is being claimed right now. Once it’s owned, it’s owned — and everyone building on top of it will know it.
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The founder and managing partner of DodsonMC who brings: 32 years of experience enhancing operations for Fortune 500 companies. A Vanderbilt Executive MBA and an Industrial Engineering undergraduate degree. Over 20 years of success in owning and growing his own businesses. A vast network of partners that have driven accelerated results.
Kip DodsonFounder
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