Amadeus maintains its "gorilla" status by being beneficial to its ecosystem, acting as a variable cost for airlines and sharing economies of scale. The ultimate test of a great business is when competitors hate you but customers love doing business with you for the same reasons.

Fal's competitive advantage lies in the operational complexity of hosting 600+ different AI models simultaneously. While competitors may optimize a single marquee model, Fal built sophisticated systems for elastic scaling, multi-datacenter caching, and GPU utilization across diverse architectures. This ability to efficiently manage variety at scale creates a deep technical moat.

The founders initially feared their data collection hardware would be easily copied. However, they discovered the true challenge and defensible moat lay in scaling the full-stack system—integrating hardware iterations, data pipelines, and training loops. The unexpected difficulty of this process created a powerful competitive advantage.

When asked if AI commoditizes software, Bravo argues that durable moats aren't just code, which can be replicated. They are the deep understanding of customer processes and the ability to service them. This involves re-engineering organizations, not just deploying a product.

Despite investor focus on its well-known distribution business, Amadeus's Air IT division (inventory, reservation management) now generates 50% of group profits. This less visible, mission-critical software segment is the company's most profitable and formidable moat.

Amadeus was formed by major airlines to create a neutral distribution system. This origin story provided immediate scale, credibility, and deep industry integration, creating a powerful competitive moat from day one that would be nearly impossible for a startup to replicate.

When airlines select an IT provider for their central nervous system, the provider's financial stability is paramount. Amadeus's strong balance sheet is a competitive weapon against more levered peers, as customers cannot risk their core operations on a financially unstable partner.

Creating a basic AI coding tool is easy. The defensible moat comes from building a vertically integrated platform with its own backend infrastructure like databases, user management, and integrations. This is extremely difficult for competitors to replicate, especially if they rely on third-party services like Superbase.

A key competitive advantage wasn't just the user network, but the sophisticated internal tools built for the operations team. Investing early in a flexible, 'drag-and-drop' system for creating complex AI training tasks allowed them to pivot quickly and meet diverse client needs, a capability competitors lacked.