A fundamental shift on AI opportunities
Call it pattern recognition from watching tech cycles play out.
If you truly understand AI today, there are exponentially more opportunities in using it to disrupt incumbents and create entirely new products than in building another AI platform.
Let’s say we’re seeing a re-run Social Media explosion - accelerated…
What’s unfolding mirrors the social app explosion of 2002-2012, but compressed. The winners and losers will be decided faster, and the consolidation will be more efficient.
Consider what every team building with AI agents is discovering simultaneously:
- Agentic-first productivity and ticketing systems
- QA workflows with built-in critics
- New documentation paradigms that live alongside code
- Accelerated code analysis capabilities
- Reusable templates for common app architectures
- Enhanced build tools supporting agent swarms
These aren’t proprietary insights — they’re table stakes. The “frontier” builders in Agentics aren’t quiet about what’s missing and the foundational providers are responding.
Foundational AI companies aren’t leaving money on the table and will systematically absorb every high-value workflow:
- Ideation and brainstorming
- Deep research and data analysis
- Creative content generation
- Coding Agents
- Productivity automation
Why? Because coding alone represents a massive percentage of B2B usage. More critically, coding capability enables recursive self-improvement. It’s a fundamental competency these models must master to level themselves up.
I shared similar warnings in 2010 as entrepreneurs rushed to build social networks and widgets. There was a window to compete and it closed.
The dynamics are identical today:
- Some innovative ideas will be absorbed into core platforms
- A handful will be acquired
- Most will be steamrolled
What’s the pivot?
If you’ve developed novel AI workflows, your best move might be keeping them as your competitive advantage rather than productizing them.
For those building AI-first businesses, the sustainable opportunities lie in:
- Leveraging AI to transform traditional industries
- Creating bespoke solutions for specific verticals
- Building specialized agency services
The market for standalone AI tools has an expiration date: 3-5 years before foundational platforms consume everything to justify their valuations.
In the end, there’s exponentially more opportunity in riding this wave — using AI to reimagine existing markets — than in trying to compete with the platforms creating it.
The gold rush for new co’s isn’t in selling shovels. It’s in using them to mine entirely new territories while there is still time to do so.