It is a time to be selling pick axes and shovels: AI Tooling
Every day I open up my inbox and read about new AI evolutions. This week it can make better fake images. Last week a leading LLM released a model which is 10 times quicker and 20 times smarter. Next week it’ll teach my dog new tricks.
It’s exciting, all this exponential growth, but it’s also exhausting for us as software engineers, and especially for those of us seeking to build businesses on the cusp of this fluctuating wave.
Recently I’ve been trying to step out of the tech tsunami and relook at my relationship to AI, specifically when I think about business and code.
Slowly, agents take over the majority of the code I write, (with strict management).
Slowly, agents start doing some of the key business growth tasks, (e.g. my pSEO bot-agent).
So what, in the end, will AI make of us?
An AI Entrepreneur Paradigm Shift
This year I’ve been working on my challenge to make a 100% AI business. I took it on to make myself jump headfirst into the AI ocean and try to catch the wave. About now, I’ve got a makeshift board, and am paddling towards the crest.
… but three quarters of the way through the year, I thought I’d be getting somewhere profitable. Note to self: Add an optimism bias debunker paragraph to my system prompt.
I’ve written a lot about AI and entrepreneurialism. So far the posts which have really attracted most subscribers have not been the thought pieces, nor even the how-to guides for creating AI automations. My top two posts have been my Gumloop review, and my Lindy AI review. Literally just tool reviews.
Setting aside that two very different automation platforms both seem to attract attention. What I think I’m seeing in my data is that people are more interested in the tools than the process. At least, it seems so for my audience.
So what does that mean for me?
As Entrepreneurs
As entrepreneurs in an AI era we exist in a complex time. There are surely many bounties out there for capitalising on LLM and automation development. There is also fresh blood, hyped up by larger social platforms, equipped with ChatGPT, Notion, caffeine and ketones.
Part of my own self-soothing narrative was that the wisdom in-market would help me as a software entrepreneur outperform the cursor equipped newbies.
I don’t think that’s going to be true for much more than a year.
Now, more than ever, I think it is a time to be selling pick axes and shovels.
This might be the last, and largest, ‘clean up’ season in software. As soon as LLMs get over that precipice; as soon as they can autonomously build software, software entrepreneurism will not be the same at all.
As AI Content Creators
I just wanted to experiment with AI & business. I knew that a newsletter would be an improvement on the previous year’s distribution problem. So I set myself this challenge and I went full metal into experimentation.
I thought my mix of entrepreneur chat, and AI tooling would hit a sweet spot.
It kinda did.
I myself evolved into an AI equipped entrepreneur, and have been making more and more content around using AI to enhance or completely automate businesses.
It’s great to connect with readers and hear how they’re applying the AI stuff I share.
But being a content creator working with AI is harder than I thought it would be. Trying to hustle a profitable fully automated business alongside; definite hard-mode.
With so many voices talking about AI, most of them increasingly chopping up each bit of content they make into 20 social media fragments, it’s becoming choppier and choppier waters.
If what’s most useful from this years work are my AI tool reviews, then I may have to rethink what I’m doing 😅.
As Humans
We are witnessing a growth and chaos curve which could be an order of magnitude more impactful than the industrial revolution was in the 18th century.
It is time to re-evaluate our connection to what we do for work; time to re-look at what we make with our time, our intelligence.
AI is changing the value of many outputs in our societies. It is making many impossible tasks merely hard. It will make much ‘work’ valueless. This can liberate us, if we are prepared to look inward and to keep redefining our value in this flux.
We can be participants in the equation, not just observers. We can watch this mad show, or we can interact with it, and ourselves, and have a say in what AI will make of us.
What will AI make of you? Subscribe at ProfitSwarm.ai and let’s work it out together.
