# Incumbent Bundling Risk The most dangerous competitive scenario for a vertical AI startup: the incumbent platform ships a "good enough" version of your product at zero incremental cost to their existing install base. In industrial software, the incumbents are AspenTech (80%+ of process plants), Honeywell Forge, Siemens, AVEVA, and AWS/Azure IoT. They already own the data pipeline, the historian integration, and the customer relationship. Adding an optimization layer on top of their existing platform is a feature release, not a new product. The kill zone: if your ACV is $50-60k and the incumbent bundles a 60% solution for free, your value proposition collapses. You can't win on price. You have to win on depth. Two survival strategies: - **Optimization depth incumbents can't match.** Go deeper into specific process optimization problems where the incumbent's general-purpose tool gives mediocre results. Requires genuine domain expertise and measurable performance deltas. - **Geographic/political positioning.** Sell into markets where incumbents don't prioritize or can't operate: GCC, Southeast Asia, Africa. Sovereign AI positioning creates barriers that have nothing to do with technology. See [[Sovereign AI Positioning]]. The pricing implication: if your moat is depth, your ACV must expand dramatically from pilot to production. $50k pilots that don't expand to $500k+ production contracts mean you're competing on price in the kill zone. Related: [[Technical Moat Assessment Framework]], [[Land-and-Expand in Enterprise AI]], [[Industrial AI MOC]] --- Tags: #deeptech #investing #kp