Here are my raw thoughts when it comes to the current state of the AI market and how it affects every industry on the planet.
These thoughts are not hypothetical or "projections". I'm watching the math play out in real time across the thirty businesses I've built these systems for.
Customer success teams of twelve becoming teams of four. Marketing departments of eight becoming departments of three. Processing layers of forty people getting cut to the best nine people. The work still happens. The output doesn't drop. The humans that remain are doing work that actually requires a human brain.
Here's what I've noticed.
Before AI agents, there was never a real replacement for cognitive labor. Every previous wave of automation replaced the body. Machines on factory floors. ATMs. Self-checkout. Robotic arms. None of them replaced the brain.
Outsourcing didn't replace it either. You were buying the same cognitive labor from a cheaper geography. Still needed a person. Just paid them less because they lived somewhere with lower rent. That's relocation not replacement (unlike what a lot of business owners would like to claim).
What's happening now is different in kind, not in degree.
The cognitive work itself, reading, deciding, writing, routing, verifying, following up, can be performed by a system. Not assisted. Performed. Receives the input. Applies the judgment. Produces the output. Routes it. No human in the middle.
This is a line that doesn't uncross.
Five months ago I thought this transition would take three to five years. I was wrong by a factor of ten. Between October and March, $300 billion evaporated from software stocks in five trading days. An AI agent was given $1,000 and built a business approaching a million in annual revenue. A single developer shipped an agent framework that hit 247,000 GitHub stars. Someone shipping a complete SaaS in a weekend became background noise.
The thing that would've made headlines six months ago became a Tuesday.
I'm in group chats with operators doing tens of millions a year. People who've been through every hype cycle the internet has produced. They don't get excited easily. Every one of them is saying the same thing right now: AI is changing their teams, their costs, and their competitive positions today. Not "has potential." Today. I've never seen this group unanimous on anything.
The thesis isn't "AI replaces everyone." That's lazy thinking and anyone trying to pawn that off as domain expertise is retrded. The thesis is that every business is about to carry fewer humans and more systems. The ratio shifts. The degree depends on what you're running and at what scale.
I've built these systems across twenty agency owners, a nine-figure health-tech company, one of the largest peptide manufacturers in the US, a publicly traded commerce company that did a million in twenty days, trading systems that returned +7x, and martech platforms pushing 20 million emails a month. Different industries. Same structural problem underneath. The business ran on humans doing repeatable cognitive work.
I built the system that replaced the repetition.
Here's what the transition actually looks like at each level.
If you're an agency owner, stop selling hours. Take the domain expertise your clients are actually paying for and encode it into a system that delivers the result without you personally doing the work. The agency that's still running on labor in 2027 won't exist. The one that turned its expertise into infrastructure it owns will.
If you're running an operations-heavy business, manufacturing, logistics, distribution, your opportunity is in the processing layer. Every business like yours has a layer of humans reconciling data, routing information, managing exceptions, updating systems. That's the drag. The thing your business exists to do, making the product, moving the goods, is the load-bearing structure. The processing layer around it is what gets systematized first. Not the core. The scaffolding.
If you're mid-size, fifty to five hundred people, the play is surgical. You don't transform the whole company at once. You identify the three to five functions where human labor is acting as middleware, where input comes in, gets processed through a set of rules, and output goes out, and you systematize those first. Customer support triage. Lead qualification. Internal reporting. Invoice processing. Start there. Prove the model. Expand.
If you're enterprise, this isn't a cost play for you yet. It's a capability play. The value is in systems that operate at a speed and consistency human teams can't match, while keeping humans on the decisions that carry real liability. Your transition is slower and more governed than everyone else's. But the direction is the same.
If you're a solo founder, you're in the best position of anyone reading this. No legacy systems. No org chart to reorganize. You can build from zero with the architecture everyone else is trying to retrofit. Your ceiling just went up by an order of magnitude while your costs stayed flat.
The direction is the same for all of them. Fewer employees, not zero. Strip the drag. Keep the structure. Build systems where you used to build teams.
The businesses that figure out the right ratio first win on a curve that gets steeper every quarter. Systems don't get tired, don't quit, and don't need to be retrained every time someone gives two weeks' notice.
The pressure isn't "on the way". It has already affected public software companies to the tune of $$$ 1 Trillion USD wiped from market caps.
Start preparing for the change, or get left behind. That's the unfortunate reality. You can either accept it and adapt, make more money than you could ever anticipate.
Or, you can deny and get left behind.
If any of this described your business and you want to talk about what the transition looks like for your specific situation, my DMs are open.