moat
A defensible advantage—something that makes a business hard to copy or beat, even if a competitor has better tech.
Think of it like
A castle's moat keeps invaders out; a company's moat keeps competitors out.
Example
Network effects (everyone uses it), switching costs (too expensive to leave), scale advantages (cheapest at size), brand (people trust it). In AI: data, compute, the model itself, distribution.
How it actually works
In AI, moats are hotly debated. Does a big model have a moat? Maybe not—competition is fierce. Does a fine-tuned model on proprietary data have a moat? Possibly. Does distribution (integrations, brand, network) have a moat? Often yes. The most enduring moats are usually not the tech.
For product teams
Moat determines long-term defensibility; shapes pricing power and profitability.
For engineers
Data, scale, and network effects are the strongest technical moats.
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