Plan.Net's Hadi Lotfi says AI orchestration will define the next competitive advantage

August 28, 2026 · thedrum.com

Plan.Net Agentic AI's managing director, Hadi Lotfi, sets out five takeaways in a Drum Network column arguing that competitive advantage in AI shifts from access to execution as models and agents become commodities. Lotfi writes that once organizations hold similar AI capabilities, value moves to the system surrounding the technology: decision-making structures, governance, data flows and the interaction between humans and intelligent systems. He argues the challenge ahead is organizational, since incentives, processes and management practices were built for teams made up only of humans, leaving individual AI "lighthouses" unable to reach their full potential outside a wider system. Lotfi says the most successful organizations will use AI to build institutional knowledge, tracking signals from agent interactions to learn which decisions and workflows succeed and feeding those lessons back into future processes.

Agencies that keep adding AI tools for planning, buying or reporting without deciding who owns which decisions get isolated pockets of automation that never combine into a system, based on Lotfi's argument. His piece points to a self-reinforcing cycle: organizations that track agent interactions and feed the results back into their processes learn faster than competitors and become harder to catch over time. Lotfi frames AI investment returns as still short of expectations, so the shops that get the most from their spending will have planners and buyers who direct AI systems, evaluate outcomes and apply judgment where responsibility matters most.