23 тренди в AI, про які варто знати кожному бізнес-лідеру

What's up everyone? Today I'm going to talk about all the things in AI that's keeping me up at night. I've got a giant list of just things that I can't stop thinking about. All the opportunities, some things that scare me, some ideas that you can take. And if you stick around to this whole episode, uh maybe you'll be an insomniac like me. Maybe it'll get those creative juices flowing. Maybe it'll just have a you'll have a better sense of why I'm so excited about, you know, where we're at right now and some things that also freak me out. Um, so I just figured I'd go up go on here and sort of reflect on a bunch of the things that are that are keeping me up at night that are just making me motivated that are that are interesting to me. And maybe it'll interest you, too. And, you know, if you're listening to this, I think I think it probably will. I think, you know, you're probably one of those people that, you know, see a lot of opportunity. Might be, you know, 90% see a lot of opportunity, 10% a little scared. Um, but you're also looking for some ideas to help you move along and and make progress. >> The first thing that's really, you know, I'm thinking a lot about right now is like the one hour company stack. So, you know, you grab an idea, you vibe code something, you build a landing page, you you know, you you you add a stripe and you can get first customers. I mean, the fact that you can do this, just the fact that this exists, that you can go to ideabrowser.com, get a validated idea, and just start vibe coding things with whatever vibe coding tool you want is mind-blowing. The fact that you can create a company in a day. So, I think that like from my perspective, I'm trying to think about how can I, you know, throw a lot more experiments uh against the wall, you know, um what are, you know, I don't want to just build one company, try it for six months. I want to just create a culture of and a machine that I'm creating multiple companies trying different things same audience or multiple audiences we're going to talk about audiences later but this whole idea around the 1 hour company stack I mean can't stop thinking about it second thing is you know if you think about the old timeline and this relates to the first uh the first point the old timeline of building a company was you had an idea you hired devs that took a few a few months if you can find um uh you build an MVP if you're lucky that you know you can do that by month three you launch it maybe you go to product hunt um and then you know eventually you get to you know first revenue by month 12 you know in 2026 you know you can have an idea or grab an idea from idea browser by 9:00 a.m. have something built by 9:15 a.m. have a product built by, you know, 9:45, you get the first customer by 10:00 and you iterate by lunch. Someone is going to respond and be like, "How is that possible? That's vibe coded slop." There's a few reasons how this is possible. One is you use a you know, you're not you're using a vibe coding platform. I shouldn't even say a vibe coding platform a agent engineering platform. You're using something like Claude Code. Um or or or you know, there's competitors too. Um, and you know, you you you build something comprehensive. I mean, Codeex has gotten pretty good. You know, Google AI Studio has gotten pretty good. Um, Cloud Code's gotten pretty good. So, just the fact that you can do this um with one of those tools is awesome. The second thing is, you know, you do have to have an email list. You do have to have an audience. You do have to have some customers in order to actually get them you know because uh otherwise you know as you know you know finding the customers is is really hard but if you have been building distribution if you have been and that's another thing that's been keeping me up at night is just using using AI to build distribution. Um so yeah the old time versus new timeline definitely something I've been thinking about. The other thing that's uh keeping me up at night is this concept uh I'm calling ambient businesses. So, you know, ambient businesses that run with zero or very low daily human input uh input. So having agents monitoring market, identifying opportunities, executing for you, you know, handling customer service, and basically setting up a business that you just check in once every few days. Um, and just see what's going on. Um, I think that we're going to get to a point where these ambient businesses or autonomous businesses, uh, are going to start doing seven, eight figures. Um, so this whole concept is just really, really cool to me. Um, I think we're really early. I think that, um, a lot of the autonomous, uh, company builder softwares end up building like very AI slop stuff. Um, but I do think that, you know, this direction, I like to think about it as like the arrow of progress. The arrow of arrow of progress is moving us in this direction of you're going to be building ambient or autonomous businesses. You won't need to check in every single hour. you're going to have checks and balances that are going to steer uh your agents in the right places and uh I think there's just a huge opportunity there. Um this timeline, the agent economy timeline is something that also keeps me up at night. So between 2009 and 2005 uh sorry 2009 and 2015 that really was the app store er era. You know people downloaded apps and humans operated them. Then in 2015 to 2024, I think the API economy really started to take over. You know, developers were wiring APIs together. I believe that, you know, 2025 to 2030, the agent economy is is here. So, agents discovering and hiring other agents on the fly. So, fix texts dissolving. I actually think that there's like a huge startup idea for someone to build the glass door of uh AI agents. So, how do you, you know, create reputation, uh, around agents and who to hire? Um, if someone could, you know, create a marketplace like sort of like a mold book that was a social network or is a social network for for agents that got acquired by Meta for allegedly $200 million. You know, what is the glass door of AI agents? I know this sounds like such a far-fetched idea, but this is going to happen. I read a stat uh I think that said uh I think it was by Gartner 20% by uh of commerce by 2030 will be uh agent to agent machine to machine. So how do you create startups that uh that recreate the you know that look at uh internet products um and just create the agent version of it. So I think um there's you know this market is going to 52 billion in 2030. Um today there's 31,000 agent skills on marketplaces. Um but they're pretty bad. You know uh most of them are are actually garbage. So I think there's a huge opportunity to build skills, build agents. Um and you know it's giving me bags under my eyes. So this whole concept of agents hiring agents, CEO agents, sales agent, dev agents, marketing agents. I recently did a uh tutorial on how to use paperclip, which is, you know, speaks to this concept. It's an open- source technology. Go check that out if you haven't. But basically creating an org chart like a serverless function where agents spin up subtasks and shut them down when them done. I mean, this this is just such an interesting idea. Instead of actually prompting via jobs to be done framework, it's like with humans, how do you actually just hire agents who manage other agents to get the job done? Super super interesting and uh you know, lot of opportunity there. YC predicts that there's going to be 300 plus unicorns in vertical AI in in in you know this decade. Um so vertical software huge you know huge opport you know huge business constellation software uh I think they own like 500 plus companies or something like that they've built you know SAS for vertical you know in the vertical software space so like super boring workflows in you know education in defense in you know all sorts of like really boring stuff um and uh there there's the same opportunity to sort of build your own consolation software but in vertical AI. So I think that uh you know if you're listening to this thinking about like what do you have an unfair advantage what is your niche uh that you understand really well um because I think that the people that you know are building uh in the vertical a uh agent map uh I think there's a lot of opportunity you know the YC's of the world are going to focus on these big big categories insurance real estate logistics elderare legal healthcare sales um I'm not suggesting that you go and do that um I think that you should pick a wedge in a subniche of one of these uh you know vertical categories. You know, start there and then sort of expand from there. You know, there's going to be so much funding uh into these into these big categories. So, you kind of want to, you know, just pick something that has a a little less uh competition. Um but I do think that there's a lot of opportunity here. So, you know, how do you think about vertical SAS versus vertical AI? So, this is something I'm thinking a lot about. Vertical SAS captures a fraction of it spend. You're generally selling software licenses. Um, humans are operating the tool and you're looking at the $10 to $100 million outcome usually. Of course, there's exceptions to that rule. Uh, vertical AI taps directly into labor P&L. So what I mean by that is you're getting uh you're building basically an agent as a software because you're doing that the thing that uh pe uh companies are hiring you to do is what they would hire human beings to do. So the actual market for vertical AI is bigger than vertical SAS. You know you're going to want to think about selling outcomes and results. agents are doing the work and because of this I think that the outcomes in vertical AI are on average going to be bigger than they are in vertical SAS. So unlike SAS uh which captures IT budget vertical AI replaces headcount and that's just a 10x bigger total addressable market. So yeah, if that's not keeping you up at night and all the opportunities here, I do not know what is. So what are some boring gold mine verticals? Um, you want to look at stuff that just runs on phone calls and faxes and boring stuff. Uh, these are all big categories like insurance, but you know, insurance still uses 30-year actuary tables, legal, uh, logistics, elder care, government, accounting, construction. You know, you're going to want to pick stuff want to pick stuff with, you know, in these subniches in these niches, but subniched, very, very subniched down. And you know, if I were you, I'd try to pick something that doesn't have a lot of red tape. Obviously, selling to government is really hard. Um, so, you know, things like that is are probably less interesting, but you know, the more boring the better. Uh, and the more niche the better to start. Uh, so SAS is really, uh, evolved, uh, in terms of like how we've been pricing. So, it used to be that you would do per seat licensing, uh, $50 a user a month or whatever. All these all these, you know, big SAS companies did this. And that's why you're seeing a huge correction in the stock market with, well, two reasons why you're seeing a huge correction in the stock market with SAS companies. I mean, some of these stocks are down like 50 60%. Huge companies uh that were once trading at like 12x revenue are now trading at 4x revenue on billions of dollars of revenue. And why is it happening? Well, it's happening because uh you know there's going to be less seats one and then two people are scared that uh or investors are scared that you can just vibe code these solutions. Um so yeah go you know the evolution is going from uh went from seats to usage based so pay for what you consume to now you're just seeing a lot more outcomebased stuff. So pay per result delivered. And why are you seeing that? because you're getting you're having agents actually do the work. Um so yeah, Gartner says 40% of enterprise SAS shifts to outcomebased by 2030. So seedbase is going to decline from 21 to 15%. So you know where's the opportunity? Why is this keeping me up at night? What are what are ways to go and create outcomebased pay per result businesses right now? Um there's so many there's so many. And if you can be the first to market, you have an advantage there because when you're reaching out to people, you know, be a cold or even if you're just posting uh on your email newsletter or on your, you know, social media accounts, you know, there's there's it's interesting to people, right? So, uh you might be able to sell a lot more. So, this whole seatbased versus outcomebased, you know, shift is just fascinating. the old way of $100 a seat a month, pay when whether you use it or not. Uh, you know, you get you pay 10 seats, you get $1,000 a month. And like the value is unclear. I think we've all kind of felt this. You know, there's some I won't name names, but there's some software that uh my company, my holding company, Late Checkout, pays for um and I'm just like, do we is it do are we getting the value out of this? Um, you know, we're paying thousands of dollars a month. So this whole idea around you know maybe you pay $1.50 50 per resolve tickets. Um, pay only for results. Um, and you have companies like Zenesk, which is pretty big already doing this. Um, you know, 83% of AI native SAS is already switched. So, my, you know, my big point with all this is someone's going to build a billion dollar business doing nothing but converting converting legacy SAS to uh, outcome pricing. And, uh, I think there's just a lot of opportunity to help them do that. I also think there's a ton of opportunity to just go and build outcome based startups on your own. Like why even help them um when you could be uh when you could just be incubating yourself? Um I definitely think there something to be thinking about. So, uh, I h I have to mention like I do think that there's going to be somewhat of a SAS graveyard, but you know, I started to think about like what is the framework for thinking about what's going to die. So, I think generic CRM are probably going to uh die. Uh, I'm not saying that Salesforce is going to die. I'm not saying that HubSpot is going to die. Those companies, you know, you can see see the writing on the wall and they're moving towards that future. Um but I am saying that if you're generic um and you're not moving to this feature, you probably won't you probably won't work. Uh so agents are going to do it better. Basic analytics dashboard not those businesses probably not working because AI generates insights on demands. Template marketplaces very tough business to be in because AI is generating custom templates in instantly. um scheduling tools I don't know right like where's the future of that when a agents handle calendars natively and just basic customer support you know chat bots are already replacing this so what is going to survive here well basically vertical workflow tools that pivot to agent companies infrastructure and data modes so uh there's basically this scarcity flip that's happening so what is being uh commoditized by AI AI will code generic contact uh sorry generic content basic design data entry and routine analysis. So what's what is scarce and premium and what I keep thinking about and a lot of people talk about this on on Twitter is that you know the the value is going to migrate from execution to judgment. So creative judgment, humanmade crafts, physical experiences. I'm looking at incubating stuff here. It's really, you know, a a huge opportunity. Original weird thinking, just like being weird is going to sell uh in 2026 and beyond. Uh because a lot of these LLMs are just they're not good at being weird. And you had, you know, you have a unique uh purview into life. You've experienced certain things. So like leaning into your weirdness and then proprietary data. Uh what is the premium stack? um in terms of you know what are people going to value the most in an AI world is something that I'm thinking a lot about and I think that the most premium is going to be humanmade. Uh I don't know if you saw the uh Porsche uh campaign where they did a 100% human-made ad campaign. So it was like a race to establish an AI free logo. I could see that luxury brands are going to lean into human-made and no AI involved. Uh, think of like certification labels like organic for food, right? No AI. So, that's just something to think about in terms of like ideas for building stuff. Premium, no AI involved. Uh, most premium. The premium would be AI assisted but human-led. So, having some human in the loop I think is going to be seen as premium in the AI age. So you get human taste with AI speed and then I think a commodity uh you know from a from a perception perspective will be like I'm buying just a fully AI service and then I think there's sort of a race to zero pricing uh in some categories. So I you know I mentioned that I was interested in incubating and investing in you know basically IRL stuff and the reason why is when digital is infinite and AI generated scarcity shifts to physical pre presence with other humans right so I think things like you know karaoke bars you know escape rooms uh immersive theater you know co-working uh live music you know this whole experience economy me is already here and accelerating and there's just a ton of opportunity here and that's keeping me up all all night. Um, another interesting concept is is this concept called uh founder agent fit. So, you know, when I was on the, you know, on the come up, uh, so to speak, um, it was all, everyone just kept talking about when I moved to Silicon Valley, everyone kept talking about founder founder market fit. Do you understand the customer and the market? Do you have do you have some insight as you as the founder into the market? So if you uh were building a social network for college students, you know, were you recently a college student or are you a college student? And I believe that you know where we're going is founder agent fit fit. So can you orchestrate a fleet of agents you know towards your goal? So uh you know the bigger shift here is thinking as yourself as a film director. So a film director is not holding a camera. The film director is not acting. The film director is not writing the score. Uh you know they get performances for actors. They're trying to get the most out of their actors. Now the actor is you know shifting from a person to a machine essentially. So I think that this that founder skill that founder agent fit is just an interesting you know shift that's happening um and if you're really good at you know building agents for a particular niche managing them getting the most out of them uh then you have an unfair advantage. We talked a little about this uh with regards to paperclip and and you know zero human companies, but you know this whole idea of a ghost team org chart like the fact that you know in the future you know I imagine a team page you know you go to a website and you go to the about page and then you click the team section maybe and then you see all these people and and their and their big smiles and you really get to know the team. But the future ghost team, you know, might be just a couple people and a bunch of AI agents, sales agents, content agents, customer support. Uh, and those are maybe you name them. Uh, maybe they have personalities. Uh, maybe you end up even creating images for who these people are. Um, and eventually they're going to talk back to you, right? They're going to be able to video chat you. They're going to be able to send you voice notes. like it's going to be exactly well not exactly but it's going to be in the ballpark of working with a human being. Uh so it's just you know this whole idea of ghost team or chart I mean is crazy as as a person who's building a holding company and incubating businesses um I think there's going to be a lot more holding companies uh because you're going to own a bunch of AI native agent businesses uh in similar niches or the same niche um and you're going to have these ghost teams running it. So, uh, I remember Kevin Kelly, uh, talking about the hundred true or the thousand true fans. Uh, and if you're listening to this, you probably have heard I've heard of that. Um, but I think that, you know, it's not necessarily a thousand true fans anymore in the AI age. And this is something I've been thinking about. I think it's more like the 100 true true fans because agents are cutting your cost. so dramatically that a 100 people paying you is a real business. And because of the fact that you can build software and charge, you know, $1,000 a month or $500 a month because they are doing the work of potentially human beings, then you know there's a way to build a huge business there. Also, you can they don't even need to pay you that much, right? you because you can run it with agents. Um, and you your team needs to be so small from a cost perspective could only be you, right? Then I just think that there's this like world where you create these like micro monopoly maths. So, you know, I'll go through I'll go through what I mean by this. Let's say you have a 500 5,000 engaged niche audience. You build a custom app. Maybe it's in 48 hours. you know, if you have an audience or if you have a newsletter or something, you can get to a hundred customers over $50 at $50 a month, but then you're running the business with with agents. So, uh, and then you're making about $60,000 of profit for one person, which is incredible. And then you can go and incubate multiple of these and expand this one. So, yes, you do need to get a hundred customers at $50 a month. Um and that's why you know I believe uh you know building media and building content and uh understanding how to build a machine that you know creates highquality meta ads is is really helpful here. So even if you don't have an audience you know you can pay for them and yeah it's going to cut into your profits but so be it. Um, one thing that, you know, I' I've been pretty optimistic, uh, during, you know, up up until now, but, uh, I will say one thing that kind of freaks me out is the the agent attack surface. So, uh, you know, I'm sure you've heard of prompt injections, things like poison context windows, malicious MCP service, a, uh, agent to agent manipulation, permission escalation, compromised training data. Basically, because we're giving access to, you know, so much through our ai agents. I would be lying to you if I said this didn't freak me out, that bad things, you know, are going to happen. And I think bad things are going to happen. You know, I think that cyber security hasn't caught up to this how fast we're moving in this AI agent world and because of that, I think uh you know some bad things are going to happen. So, of course, it's going to keep me up at night. um you know PaloAlto Networks uh documented real world agent uh injection attacks and uh you know if Palo Alto Networks is saying there's going to be a bunch of real world agent injection attacks well I tr I definitely trust them. So how should we think about agent injection versus fishing? So like h you know in the p in the in the past if you think about fishing uh like say 2010 it was basically like how do you trick a human being into clicking a bad link you know targeting email inboxes human judgment is the defense right so if you're if you had a good eye for fishing like chances are you'd be okay even with that billions were lost per year so you know agent injection where we are today as of recording this you know you could trick an AI agent via hidden instructions. It targets context windows and web content. The agent autonomy is the vulnerability and I believe that the potential is far bigger than fishing. So where a where agents have system access and make autonomous decisions poisoning their context window uh I guess is the new fishing, right? So uh I think it can be a lot more dangerous. I think a lot of bad things are going to happen. I do think that there's a ton of opportunity to build, you know, cyber security soft software that helps with this. Um, so that's, you know, a whole rabbit hole of startup ideas I can go down. Uh, but I I think uh it's something to be aware of. The other thing to be, uh, thinking a little bit about is the agent permission stack, right? So, what can your agent access? You know, files, emails, calendars, bank accounts. People are giving bank account access to some of their agents, right? you're seeing them, you know, here's here's $5,000. Go and trade for me. You know, what can your agent remember? Conversations, personal data, business data. What can your uh agent do? Sending emails, make purchases, modify code, delete data. What can your agent share? You know, for example, with other agents or with third parties. The point here is you're going to want to do some digital hygiene. So quarterly agent cleanses re review permissions like you review app access uh on on the web. So you know sometimes I'll go into some some of some of the SASes I use and uh I'll be like yeah this particular you know app really doesn't need access to it. So I I I dislink it. And I think we're going to do a similar thing with agent permissions as well. I believe that now in a you know in in the AJI the build cost is basically zero. Agents are doing a lot of the work. There's a ton of niches that are wide open and audiences are underpriced. I don't believe that this is going to last forever. Um but this is what's motivating me so much. I think that there's 12 months where competition starts catching up. Some of the best niches get claimed. Some of the tools get crowded. I think there's probably 24 months where the window narrows. The builders who get started now are going to start owning moes around data network brand trust. So people keep waiting for things to settle down. Things are not settling down. This is the new normal. I think that there's a so much opportunity here. Um and that's why every day matters so much. Um and you know you definitely can listen to the podcast, Startup Ideas podcast, this podcast right here. um because I'm just sharing things in real time um and and just trying to help help help you, you know, increase your probability of success with ideas, tactics that I see working in real time. Uh I believe that this window is asymmetric. So, uh you know, what I mean by that is what you need is an API key, some prompts, a tweet, a niche audience of, you know, as we talked about today, like pretty small 100 to 5,000. And there's this asymmetry. So what you can get is a business that runs 247. You could create a business that has 95% margins. Uh you could, you know, it's it's not crazy if it's if it's agent first, you know. Okay. Could it go to 70%, 80%, 60%, yes, but these are incredible businesses that you can be creating uh with compounding distribution and zero or a few employees. Um, so I believe that this is the most asymmetric time to be building a startup. What people are saying now is don't build them public, don't build them public. Um, it used to be build public, build them public, build them public. And I think that you, you know, it is helpful to build them public and people say don't build them public because they're you're inviting competition. I think that the benefits outweigh the cons. um specifically like building for, you know, if if your followers and your audience is actually your customers, then you could share what you're building. The community could vote on what they're on what you're building. And what's so cool about this AI age now is you can ship ship updates in a day or two days or 5 days. Users are basically becoming co-builders and that just increases trust and distribution compound. So, it creates this really cool uh flywheel when you're building with your audience. Um, I also believe that, you know, forking a business like how you fork for fork a repo on GitHub, uh, is going to be very common. So, you know, in a world where you can just copy other people's businesses, really quickly, bringing in a community and and making them feel like they're a part of building what you're building, I think, is going to be absolutely uh a huge mode and and really important. And there you have it. I mean, like I said, this is an incredible time to be building. Um, there's just so much so many things happening all at the same time. Uh, it does feel overwhelming in a lot of ways. But if you just get to work, start making progress every day, realize that you're not going to understand every single AI tool on the planet. Understand how to use it perfectly on on the planet. Realize that uh you're just learning as you go. You're building as you go with momentum every day better than the next. Um I mean, what an incredible time to be building. Um and uh let's do this together. I'll see you on the next episode and thank you for le listening.