23 AI Trends keeping me up at night

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, maybe you'll be an insomniac like me, maybe it'll get those creative juices flowing, maybe it'll just have a better sense of why I'm so excited about where we're at right now and some things that also freak me out. So I just figured I'd go up, go on here and sort of reflect on a bunch of the things that are keeping me up at night that are just making me motivated that are interesting to me and maybe it'll interest you too. And if you're listening to this, I think it probably will. I think you're probably one of those people that see a lot of opportunity, might be 90% see a lot of opportunity, 10% a little scared, but you're also looking for some ideas to help you move along and make progress. The first thing that's really I'm thinking a lot about right now is the one-hour company stack. You grab an idea, you vibe code something, you build a landing page, you add a strive and you can get first customers. 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 from my perspective, I'm trying to think about how can I throw a lot more experiments against the wall. 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 one-hour company stack, I mean, can't stop thinking about it. Second thing is, if you think about the old timeline, this relates to the first point. The old timeline of building a company was, you had an idea, you hired devs that took a few months, if you can find them, you built an MVP, if you're lucky that you can do that by month three, you launch it, maybe you go to product time, and then eventually you get to first revenue by month 12. In 2026, you can have an idea or grab an idea from an idea browser by 9am, have something built by 9.15am, have a product built by 9.45, you get the first customer by 10 and you iterate by lunch. Someone is going to respond and be like, how is that possible? That's vibe coded slot. There's a few reasons how this is possible. One is, you're using a vibe coding platform. I shouldn't even say a vibe coding platform using something like Cloud Code or the competitors too. And you build something comprehensive. I mean, CodeX has gotten pretty good. Google AI Studio has gotten pretty good. Cloud code has gotten pretty good. So just the fact that you can do this with one of those tools is awesome. The second thing is, 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. Otherwise, as you know, finding the customers 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. So yeah, the old time versus new timeline, definitely something I've been thinking about. The other thing that's keeping me up at night is this concept. I'm calling ambient businesses. So, you know, ambient businesses that run with zero or very low daily human 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 and just see what's going on. I think that we're going to get to a point where these ambient businesses or autonomous businesses are going to start doing seven, eight figures. So this whole concept is just really, really cool to me. I think we're really early. I think that a lot of the autonomous company builder softwares end up building a very AI-slop stuff. But I do think that, you know, this direction, I like to think about as the arrow of progress. The 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 your agents in the right places. And I think there's just a huge opportunity there. This timeline, the agent economy timeline is something that also keeps me up at night. So between 2009 and 2015, that really was the app store 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 here. So agents discovering and hiring other agents on the fly. So fixed text acts dissolving. I actually think that there's like a huge startup idea for someone to build the glass door of AI agents. So how do you, you know, create reputation around agents and who to hire? 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 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 fetch idea, but this is going to happen. I read a stat. I think that said, I think it was by Gartner, 20% of commerce by 2030 will be agent to agent, machine to machine. So how do you create startups that recreate the, you know, that look at internet products and just create the agent version of it. So I think there's, you know, this market is going to 52 billion in 2030. Today there's 31,000 agent skills on marketplaces, but they're pretty bad, you know, most of them are actually garbage. So I think there's a huge opportunity to build skills, build agents 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 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 sub-task and shut them down and then them done. I mean, 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, you know, a lot of opportunity there. Why see predicts that there's going to be 300 plus unicorns in vertical AI in this decade? So vertical software, huge, you know, huge, you know, huge business, consolation software. I think they own like 500 plus companies or something like that. They've built, you know, SaaS for vertical, you know, in the vertical software space. So like super boring workflows in, you know, education and defense and, you know, all sorts of like really boring stuff. And there's the same opportunity to sort of build your own consolation software, but in vertical AI. So I think that, you know, if you're listening to this, thinking about like, what do you have an unfair advantage? What is your niche that you understand really well? Because I think that the people that, you know, are building in the vertical agent map, I think there's just a lot of opportunity. You know, the YCs of the world are going to focus on these big, big categories, insurance, real estate, logistics, eldercare, legal healthcare, sales. I'm not suggesting that you go and do that. I think that you should pick a wedge in a subniche of one of these, 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 into these, into these big categories. So you kind of want to, you know, just pick something that has a little less competition, but I do think that there's a lot of opportunity here. So, you know, how do you think about vertical SaaS versus vertical AI? So this is something I'm thinking a lot about. Vertical SaaS captures a fraction of IT spend. You're generally selling software licenses. 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. Vertical AI taps directly into labor P&L. So what I mean by that is you're getting, you're building basically an agent as a software. Because you're doing that, the thing that 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 SaaS. 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 SaaS. So unlike SaaS, 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 a night and all the opportunities here, I do not know what is. So what are some boring gold mine verticals? You want to look at stuff that just runs on phone calls and faxes and boring stuff. These are all big categories like insurance, but insurance still uses 30-year actuary tables, legal logistics, eldercare, government accounting, construction. You know, you're going to want to pick stuff with, you know, in these subniche, in these niches, but subniche, very, very subniche 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. So, you know, things like that are probably less interesting, but you know, the more boring the better and the more niche the better to start. So SaaS is really evolved in terms of like how we've been pricing. So it used to be that you would do per seat licensing, $50 a month or whatever. All these, you know, big SaaS 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 SaaS companies. I mean, some of these stocks are down like 50, 60 percent. Huge companies that were once trading at like 12X revenue, we're now trading out 4X revenue on billions of dollars of revenue. And why is it happening? Well, it's happening because, you know, there's going to be less seats. One, and then two, people are scared that, or investors are scared that you can just vibe code these solutions. So yeah, you know, the evolution is going from when from seats to usage base, so pay for what you consume. To now, you're just seeing a lot more outcome-based stuff. So pay per result delivered. And why are you seeing that? Because you're getting, you're having agents actually do the work. So yeah, Gartner says 40 percent of enterprise SaaS shifts to outcome-based by 2030. So seat base is going to decline from 21 to 15 percent. So, you know, where's the opportunity? Why is this keeping me up a night? What are ways to go and create outcome-based pay per result businesses right now? 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 at cold or even if you're just posting on your email newsletter or on your social media accounts, you know, there's, it's interesting to people, right? So you might be able to sell a lot more. So this whole seat base versus outcome-based, you know, shift is just fascinating. The old way of $100 a seat a month, pay when at whether you use it or not, 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 my company, my holding company, they check out pays for. And I'm just like, do we, is it, do we, are we getting the value out of this? You know, I'm paying thousands of dollars a month. So this whole idea around, you know, maybe you pay $1.50 per resolve tickets, pay only for results, and you have companies like ZenDesk, which is pretty big already doing this. You know, 83 percent of AI native SaaS 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, good converting legacy SaaS to outcome pricing. And 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 when you could be, then you could just be incubating yourself. I definitely think there, there's something to be thinking about. So I have to mention, like I do think that there's going to be somewhat of a SaaS 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 CRMs are probably going to die. I'm not saying that Salesforce is going to die. I'm not saying HubSpot is going to die. Those companies, you know, you can see the writing on the wall and they're moving towards that future. But I am saying that if you're generic and you're not moving to this future, you probably won't, you probably won't work. 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 instantly. Scheduling tools, I don't know, right? Like where's the future of that? When 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 a vertical workflow tool is that pivot to agent companies, infrastructure and data modes. So there's basically this scarcity flip that's happening. So what is being commoditized by AI will code generic content, sorry generic content, basic design, data entry and routine analysis. So what is scarce and premium and what I keep thinking about and a lot of people talk about this on Twitter is that, the value is going to migrate from execution to judgment. So creative judgment, human-made crafts, physical experiences. I'm looking at incubating stuff here. It's really a huge opportunity. Original weird thinking, just like being weird is going to sell in 2026 and beyond because a lot of these LLMs are just, they're not going to be weird and you have a unique per view into life, you've experienced certain things, so like leaning into your weirdness and then proprietary data. What is the premium stack 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 human-made. I don't know if you saw the Porsche 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. I think of like certification labels like organic for food, right? No AI. So that's just something I think about in terms of like ideas for building stuff, premium, no AI involved, most premium. The premium would be AI-sisted 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 you know 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 in some categories. So 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 presence with other humans, right? So I think things like you know karaoke bars you know escape rooms, immersive theater, you know co-working, live music, you know this whole experience economy is already here and accelerating and there's just a ton of opportunity here and that's keeping me up all all night. Another interesting concept is this concept called founder agent fit. So you know when I was on the you know on the come up so to speak 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 some insight as you as the founder into the market? So if you 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. So can you orchestrate a fleet of agents you know towards your goal? So 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. 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 the that founder skill that founder agent fit is just an interesting you know shift that's happening and if you're really good at you know building agents for particular niche managing them getting the most of them then you have an unfair advantage. We talked a little about this 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 they're in 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 and those are maybe you name them maybe they have personalities maybe you end up even creating images for who these people are 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. So it's just you know this whole idea of ghost team org chart I mean is crazy as a person who's building a holding company and incubating businesses I think there's going to be a lot more holding companies because you're going to own a bunch of AI native agent businesses in similar niches or the same niche and you're going to have these ghost teams running it. So I remember Kevin Kelly talking about the 100 true or the 1000 true fans and if you're listening to this you probably have heard of heard of that but I think that you know it's not necessarily a 1000 true fans anymore in the AI agent this is something I've been thinking about I think it's more like the 100 true true fans because agents are cutting your costs so dramatically that 100 people paying you is a real business and because of the fact that you can build software and charge you know a thousand dollars a month or five hundred dollars 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 and 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 math so you know I'll go through I'll go through what I mean by this let's say you have a five hundred five thousand 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 100 customers over $50 at $50 a month but then you're running the business with with agents so and then you're making about $60,000 a 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 100 customers at $50 a month and that's why you know I believe you know building media and building content and understanding how to build a machine that you know creates high quality med ads is really helpful here so even if you don't have an audience you can pay for them and yeah it's going to cut into your profits but so be it one thing that you know I've been pretty optimistic during you know up into now but I will say one thing that kind of freaks me out is the the agent attacks surface so you know I'm sure you've heard of prompt injections things like poison context windows malicious MCP service agent agent manipulation permission escalation compromise training data basically because we're giving access to you know so much through 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 you know some bad things are going to happen so of course it's going to keep me up at night you know Palo Alto networks documented real world agent injection attacks and you know if Palo Alto networks is saying there's going to be a bunch of real world agent injection attacks well I trust I definitely trust them so how should we think about agent injection versus fishing so like you know in the in the in the past if you think about fishing 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 we're assist agent where agents have system access and make autonomous decisions poisoning their context window I guess is the new fishing right so I think it can be a lot more dangerous I think a lot of bad things are going to happen I do think there's a ton of opportunity to build you know cyber security software that helps with this um so that's you know a whole rabbit hole startup ideas I can go down uh but I I think uh 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 five thousand dollars going trade for me you know what can your agent remember conversations personal data business data what can your agent do sending emails make purchases modified 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 review review permissions like you review app access uh on on the web so you know sometimes I'll go into some of some of the 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 dislike uh unlink it and I think we're going to do a similar thing with agent permissions as well I believe that now you know you know 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 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 modes 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 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 start up 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 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 hundred to five thousand and there's this asymmetry so what you can get is a business that runs 24 seven you could create a business that has 95% margins um 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 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 in public don't build in public um it used to be build in public build in public build in public and I think that you you know it is helpful to build in public and people say don't build in 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 five 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 fork a repo and GitHub uh is going to be very common so you know in a world where you can just copy other people's businesses really 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 vote 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 one 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 less listening hope this got your creative juices flowing and uh I'll see you soon