Market position is not scale and not brand recognition. A buyer wants to know whether the company holds its place in the market when circumstances change, and whether that holding on depends on the company or on the people who currently work there. For a company where AI works alongside, there is an additional question: does the position rest on work that the company itself controls, or on work that is still done by hand right now because no one has set it up differently.
That second question is new, and it changes the weight of everything else. A market position that holds up because three people know exactly how something must be done is a different thing from a market position that holds up because the process has been fixed in such a way that the result does not depend on those three people. A buyer does not see that difference in the revenue. He sees it in how the work is structured.
In parts of every company, this is already underway, even without anyone having named it as such. Customer contact that first ran by phone now partly runs through a system that recognises and answers questions. Quotes that were first built by hand now partly come from a template that calculates itself. Reports that used to take a day are now partly assembled in an hour.
Three categories run through this, and they determine what a buyer attributes to the company as market position and what he attributes to the market in general. Work that AI takes over completely counts as process: it continues without anyone holding onto it. Work where a human approves or rejects with reason counts as a controlled process: it continues, with an eye on it. Work that remains human work counts as dependency, until proven otherwise.
The difference between companies does not lie in the sector and not in the size. It lies in whether anyone has ever gone and worked out which part of the work falls into which category. Companies where that has happened can show a buyer what their position rests on. Companies where that has not happened leave that question to the buyer, and a buyer who has to work it out himself calculates with a discount for uncertainty.
There are a few indications that are already visible without external research.
Look at how a quote, a delivery, or a customer question moves through the company, and count what part of the steps is done by a system, what part by a system with a controlling eye on it, and what part entirely by a person. A company where the largest part of the customer journey rests on the first two categories has a position that depends on the company. A company where the largest part rests on the third category has a position that depends on people, even if those people are still present now.
Also look at how recently that division was established. Work shifts, and a division from two years ago says little about today. And look at who in the company can explain why a task falls into one of the three categories. If the answer lies only with the owner, market position is at that point just as dependent as owner dependency elsewhere in the company.
The value scan places market position as one of eight drivers, with a maturity score that rests on evidence, not on estimation. Evidence here means: a list of customer processes with, per process, the category into which the work falls, who or what carries it out, and how long that situation has already existed. From that list follows whether the company's position rests on the company itself or on the people who are currently there, and the latter directly affects the owner dependency index.
This measurement does not stand apart from the rest. A market position that partly rests on one customer or one supplier weighs differently than a position that sits broadly within the process, and that connection also touches customer concentration and profit quality. The eight drivers are therefore not scored separately; they are placed side by side, so that it becomes clear which driver is weighing most heavily on the price today.
Improvement here does not mean deploying more AI to make the number rise. It means making visible what is already happening, and, where possible, fixing what currently still sits with a person so that the company can demonstrate it to whoever asks. That is a different question from whether staff need to be added, let go, or redeployed; that decision lies with the employer and has its own legal requirements. What the scan delivers is the factual picture of where the work currently stands, not advice on what to do with it.
The underlying question — which work in this company can truly be taken over by AI — is answered per task with the work scan from FTE TO AI. That is a separate track; this page is about what a buyer sees and measures as market position, not about the execution.
For the broader transfer, it is also worth knowing what succession readiness does to the price and which legal matters need to be in order for a sale, because a buyer rarely counts market position separately from those two.
There is a free value check: eight short questions, one per driver, resulting in a picture of which driver is weighing most heavily on your price today. The full value scan, with maturity scores per driver, evidence, the owner dependency index, and a two-year calendar toward the exit moment, is under construction.