“In a 40-person company, competitive research often falls to the CEO at 10 p.m. after a full day of running the business.”
Catherine Beck is the co-founder and CEO of Rival Shark, an AI-powered competitive and market intelligence platform. She is a four-time founder and former Fortune 100 executive with more than 25 years of experience. Before launching Rival Shark, she served as VP of Customer Experience at Allianz Life and VP of Customer Experience, Data & Analytics at Ameriprise Financial.
TAKEAWAYS
People First, Pixels Second
I was just at MIT and I was recognized as one of their 2026 change makers for their AI-powered women summit. The entire conference was really focused on the human piece of AI.
This means, the people that will be most successful using AI are not necessarily the the ones who are gonna know the most about technology. It’s gonna be the ones that put people first and identify the right problem that they're trying to solve.
In this next era, get hands-on with the technology, experiment with it, break it, and try different tools. Think about where you can remove friction from from your work, or create an experience that hasn't become possible yet, and bring your perspective, empathy, curiosity into it.
Sell the Solution, Not the Science
AI is an enabler and it shouldn't be the value proposition. We all have a tendency to talk too much about the technology, how it works, and not enough around what it changes for the customer because it exists.
With RivalShark, we spent a lot of time talking about the models, the agents, the data sources, the integrations—but that's not what our customers are buying.
They're buying the ability to see something sooner, understand things faster, and make better decisions. They're able to bring competitive information into their leadership meetings and talk about specifics in real time versus having to react to it because they lost a deal. Founders need to keep asking themselves, “If I remove the word AI from my pitch, would the customer still understand why they need this?”
