Where do AI vendors oversell, and what's a real moat?

Be suspicious of "AI strategy" with no implementation attached, of fine-tuning pitched when a prompt would do, and of rip-and-replace where integration would do. Gartner calls it "agent washing": vendors rebranding chatbots and old automation as "agentic." Andreessen Horowitz, an AI investor with every reason to talk it up, argues the opposite is true at the margin: AI gross margins often run 50 to 60 percent against 60 to 80 percent for comparable software, and the model "may largely be a pass-through" to the underlying product and data. Benedict Evans puts it plainly: frontier models are converging, so the moat is not the model but how you use it. What is actually defensible is unglamorous: proprietary data and the feedback loops that improve it, deep integration into how work happens, switching costs, and a quality system you own. The model is rented.