Jeremy Barnett is a 3x founder and the CEO and Co-founder of RAD Intel.
The fastest way to waste money on growth is to enter a new market before you understand why people there would choose you.
For years, companies expanded with a familiar formula: prove demand, build broad awareness and move into as many cities or regions as possible. That approach made sense when deep local understanding was expensive and slow. AI changes that.
Leaders can now see which groups influence buying decisions, where trust already exists, how ideas spread and what motivates people to try something new before committing significant capital. That creates a very different expansion playbook. The question is no longer simply where to grow next but where growth is most likely to take hold and why.
Communities compound faster than markets.
One mistake I see companies make is assuming markets are what create momentum. In my experience, communities create momentum. Markets simply contain them.
DoorDash is one of the largest delivery platforms in the country, but it didn’t begin by trying to win every city at once. It started by solving a very specific problem for restaurants and customers in Palo Alto, California, and learning from that market before expanding city by city.
Over time, the platform evolved beyond restaurant delivery to groceries, convenience items and multi-stop orders. Analysis of public conversations using Lickly, our AI-driven decision intelligence platform for marketing, found customers incorporating the service into broader everyday routines, including combining meals with snacks, drinks and household essentials. Along the way, DoorDash refined its understanding with every new community it entered, eventually building the national business it has today.
That’s the advantage of starting with a focused community. Every expansion becomes easier because the business learns something worth carrying into the next one. Every market should leave a company smarter than when it entered.
AI changes the economics of expansion.
Choosing the next market has never been the hard part. Understanding how that market actually works has been.
For years, leaders had to make expansion decisions with limited visibility into the communities they were trying to serve. They knew where they wanted to grow but had far less confidence in how growth would actually happen once they arrived.
Building that level of understanding was expensive. It required regional teams, customer research, agency partners and months of testing. By the time companies gathered enough information to make a confident decision, the opportunity had often changed.
That’s no longer the only way to do it. Instead of relying primarily on broad demographic data or historical market research, organizations can now understand which communities drive momentum inside a market. They can see which groups influence purchasing decisions, where trust already exists, how ideas spread and what motivates people to adopt something new.
Where does momentum actually begin?
Take Boston and Las Vegas. On paper, both are attractive growth markets. Both have expanding economies, growing business communities and significant opportunities for new companies. That’s usually where expansion planning stops. However, a city isn’t an audience, and it isn’t a single community.
Boston’s healthcare ecosystem doesn’t make decisions the same way its startup community does. University networks operate differently than financial services. In Las Vegas, hospitality groups, sports organizations, local business communities and convention-driven industries all create their own patterns of influence and trust.
The city is simply where those communities happen to exist. Companies earn relevance one community at a time, and that’s where momentum either builds or breaks down. The better a company understands where adoption is most likely to begin, the less capital it has to spend trying to manufacture momentum across an entire market.
Every market learns from the next.
I think this is where expansion strategy is headed. The old model was largely about replication; find something that works and repeat it in the next city.
The new model is about learning. Every market reveals something the company didn’t know before. It shows which assumptions were right, which partnerships accelerated adoption, where trust developed naturally and which parts of the business translated well into a new community. Those lessons become part of the next expansion.
AI has the ability to make it much easier to capture those patterns instead of treating each market as a fresh start. Over time, expansion can become less about repeating the same playbook everywhere and more about continuously improving the playbook itself.
Expansion is becoming a learning system.
The world has changed. The global marketplace is larger than ever, and the U.S. has become one of the most competitive destinations for companies looking to grow. As more brands compete for the same customers, broad reach becomes less of a competitive advantage. In many ways, the bigger the opportunity becomes, the more important it is to understand the specific communities most likely to embrace your business first.
Putting that level of understanding to work also means changing how some expansion decisions get made. Most companies already have established processes for deciding where to expand, allocating capital and evaluating new markets, and reworking those processes requires more than adding another tool. Leaders also have legitimate questions about data privacy, security and whether the intelligence is reliable enough to inform a consequential decision.
In my experience, AI is most useful in expansion when it helps leaders challenge assumptions earlier, uncover what they couldn’t see before and make better-informed decisions about where to commit capital. The judgment behind those decisions still belongs to the people responsible for making them.
The objective hasn’t changed. Many companies still want to build a national—and, ultimately, global—business. What’s changing is how much leaders can know before they commit capital. That shift won’t eliminate risk, but it has the potential to make expansion more deliberate, more repeatable and more effective.
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