AI Revolution: A Founder's Contrarian Discussion about the AI Application Layer
The startup and venture capital ecosystem is currently navigating unfamiliar waters, with incremental improvements to existing tools and user experiences. It's no wonder why most will shipwreck. Hindsight is 20-20, but from first principles, we can conclude that just over the horizon lies a vast, untapped ocean of opportunity. The fastest-growing startups will be those that harness the power of AI to revolutionize operational efficiency through a new kind of SaaS called "service as software."
The global GDP of service-based industries is roughly $20 trillion and growing due to Jevon’s paradox. We can conclude that the next wave of unicorns will have valuations an order of magnitude larger as services and labor become digitized in this AI platform shift. In the next 1-2 years, the companies that will navigate this uncharted territory most effectively will be those that fully embrace the potential of AI to streamline and automate manual and specialized tasks. These companies will eliminate the need for large, inefficient, and outdated departments, moving beyond being just another application or user-operated tool.

This new breed of intrepid explorers will chart a course towards a minimum of 20x improvements in efficiency. They will leave behind the outdated maps of the "Web 2.0 tool syndrome," where users pay around $20 per month. Instead, valuable units of specialized full-service could easily go for $200-$2000 per month per unit seat (or equivalent usage-based pricing), depending on the type of labor being replaced. This model will still see the hypergrowth needed to be venture scale over the next 5 years.

Initially, this journey will inevitably be met with skepticism and resistance. The familiar shores of the current ecosystem beckon with their siren song of incremental progress, world-class designed apps, new ways to communicate with applications, and proud Google software developer salaries as a badge of honor. However, the innovators who boldly set sail towards the horizon of AI-driven service as software will ultimately discover a new world of opportunity. Formerly low-margin, high-labor business categories with lots of salaries and departments can become highly profitable, low-labor startup disruptors servicing many old-category companies across whole industries. This enables all companies to benefit from AI.

Consider the short-term rental management market, where property managers currently charge a hefty 20%+ of rental income for their services (thousands of dollars per month). By leveraging AI and deep industry-expertise knowledge databases to automate tasks such as guest communication, dynamic pricing, and cleaning scheduling, a startup like “Kingdom Stays .ai” offers a far more efficient and cost-effective solution. It disrupts the industry by offering the same, if not better, quality service for a few hundred dollars a month instead of a few thousand.

Venture capitalists who can read the tides from first principles and chart a course toward this new world will find themselves at the helm of a transformative movement. They will be the ones to discover the hidden treasures of AI-driven efficiency, where once-unprofitable industries can become the most valuable trade routes in the startup ecosystem. In the end, startups and venture capitalists alike can chart a much higher value-generating course towards a new world of disruptive growth, where the power of AI can reshape entire industries and create a sea change in the way we work and live.