Every company building AI right now is selling “general” - platforms, configurable tools, something that “works for everyone”
But the general is always a left hemispheric representation, it's always already inside a frame, and the frame is something specific that nobody building it seems to notice or acknowledge.
All platforms have an ontology baked into it (eg what counts as data, what an insight looks like, what action means in their system) and it calls itself configurable so you don't see that you've adopted someone else's way of seeing the moment you logged in.
The move is always the same, abstract first and then parameterize down, start from the general and let the customer "customize" within boundaries they didn't set.
But a frame can never be general.
The frame is the specific thing that allows generality to emerge inside it. You can never see the frame from within the general it produces, because you're already looking through it by the time you notice what you're looking at.
This is McGilchrist's whole point, the left hemisphere operates within a world the right hemisphere has already given it, and it can't see that prior act of giving.
So the specific is prior to the general.
Every representation presupposes a worldview, every dashboard presupposes what matters before the first number appears on it.
The ontology (ie the lens, the worldview, the way of carving up what's real) is always there before the first data point, shaping what can even show up as signal.
You don't escape this by making the tool more configurable, you just push the frame deeper where it's harder to question.
Which means all value lives in the specific.
In the unique frame that actually fits this situation, these people, this particular set of tensions, not a template applied but something that emerged through sustained attention to the particular.
That's irreplaceable in a way generic platforms never will be, because the customer can't rebuild what they can't see from inside their current frame, and competitors can't copy what isn't a feature list but accumulated participation in someone's specific reality.
Generic platforms commoditize instantly for exactly this reason, they're selling the general, which is interchangeable by definition.
That’s what general means.
The thing that resists commoditization is the specific lens, which is valuable, the worldview that actually sees what this organization needs to see, grown through relationship with the particular over time instead of configured from a menu.