Level 7 – AI Market (Subscribers)
(The Race for Leadership: Organic or External Growth?)
Inspired by the BFM Summer 2025 game, this session (reserved for subscribers) takes you into the world of artificial intelligence. Over the past five years, the world’s leading Internet companies have experienced phenomenal growth, and their market capitalizations now exceed the GDP of many countries.
It is becoming increasingly clear that artificial intelligence is revolutionizing both the Internet search market and the social media market. Internet companies have grown rapidly by capturing the advertising market, where they have achieved extremely high market shares. Today, overall growth is expected to slow, making competition even more intense.
The economic context:
This competitive board begins in 2025.
We have designed a strategic landscape in which eight competitors fiercely compete across eight Internet market segments. Reality is, of course, much more complex, and this is only an educational simulation. Nevertheless, this board allows you to think about the major disruptions that are likely to reshape the industry.
Each of the eight segments was originally established by a well-identified company. Competitive dynamics are changing the balance of power, allowing newcomers to expand aggressively into markets adjacent to their original segment. Making the right resource allocation decisions is critical: focusing on markets that are too small will ultimately limit your company’s size, while spreading yourself too thin may cause you to lose everything. Finding the right balance is more important than ever.
As with the other game sessions, don’t forget to review the course material, especially the chapter on substitutions (Chapter 4) and the chapter on exit strategies (Chapter 8).
The competitive landscape at the start of the game:
This new competitive board features eight competitors across eight market segments:
- 5 software segments that have become “traditional” following previous Internet revolutions:
- Search (traditional search engines)
- Other software (consumer software, operating systems, etc.)
- Social networks
- Cloud (data centers)
- Streaming (video-on-demand platforms)
- 1 physical products segment:
- Consumer hardware (smartphones, virtual reality headsets, smart glasses, etc.)
- 2 new high-growth segments driven by the explosion of generative artificial intelligence:
- AI bots (chatbots)
- AI agents (AI-powered autonomous agents capable of performing complex tasks).
AI Market – Initial assets of the eight competitors
(fictional companies and data)
Your company:
In this session, you are responsible for the strategic decisions of Starmil, a young unicorn trying to establish itself among Internet giants that already generate massive cash flows thanks to their leadership in traditional segments (search engines, operating systems, social networks, online services, etc.).
Starmil operates in both rapidly growing generative AI segments (AI bots and AI agents), but holds very small market shares and has limited financial resources compared with its direct competitors.
Will you be able to carve out your place in this new Wild West?
AI Market – Starmil Board of Directors
(fictional companies and data)
Main game settings:
Games are shorter than usual. Since the industry is growing rapidly, the time horizon is ten years. Each year in the simulation lasts 3 minutes, so a full game lasts a maximum of 30 minutes. You can speed up time by clicking “Skip Year”.
Strategic action levers
You will have access to all the usual strategic action levers:
- Borrow from your bank (with linear repayment over 5 years)
- Issue new shares
- Repurchase your own shares
- Adjust the annual dividend payout ratio distributed to shareholders.
The major new feature of this session is that you will also gain access to a new strategic lever: external growth, allowing you to:
- Auction off your least profitable or least strategic business divisions,
- Purchase divisions put up for sale by your competitors.
Sales take place through an auction process. Selling companies set a reserve price, while interested competitors submit a bid, which is evaluated the following year.
A purchased division is merged into the equivalent division of the acquiring company at the pre-sale asset value.
The seller then receives the amount offered by the buyer.
Good luck!
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To start a new game:
. If you are using a computer: Click here
. If you are using a smartphone or tablet, download the “Strathena” mobile app from Google Play or the App Store.
