Forrester's Chief Research Officer: AI Tooling Stopped Being a Differentiator the Moment Everyone Bought the Same Tools

AI technology alone no longer confers competitive advantage — that’s the claim Forrester’s Chief Research Officer Sharyn Leaver and Chief Product Officer Carrie Johnson make about their own industry, and it’s an uncomfortable one for a research firm whose product is increasingly AI-assisted. Their argument: access to AI tooling has commoditized across the market, so the actual edge now comes from how well an organization blends artificial intelligence with human intelligence and judgment. Forrester frames its own operating philosophy as “AI + HI,” noting it shipped its first generative AI research tool back in 2023 — and still leans on human analysts for organizational context, market perspective built from ongoing research, and the willingness to challenge a strategic direction AI alone would validate uncritically.

That’s Forrester making a case about its own product, but it’s the same commoditization argument a16z made from the investor side: as frontier models improve and their cost falls, raw model intelligence becomes a commodity fast, and any company whose only edge is “we use a good model” is exposed to erosion the moment a competitor adopts the same one. a16z’s answer for where durable advantage actually lives — proprietary data, deep workflow integration, and usable execution rather than theoretical capability — maps almost directly onto what Forrester calls human judgment: an analyst’s or seller’s proprietary context is the data moat, their standing relationship with a buyer is the workflow integration, and their read of the room is the execution layer a model can’t replicate from a transcript.

For sales organizations watching every competitor roll out the same AI-sales-tool stack this quarter, the two arguments together are a warning against a specific trap: mistaking “everyone has this tool now” for “we’re behind.” The Ceiling Method read: once the tool is table stakes, the rep or RevOps leader who wins is the one who still supplies the judgment the tool was never going to have — not the one who bought the tool first.