23 AI Trends keeping me up at night

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
What's up, everyone? Today, I'm gonna 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, you'll 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 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. So, you grab an idea, you vibe code something, you build a landing page, you add a stripe, and you can get first customers. I mean, the fact that you can do this, 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 and 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. The second thing is, if you think about the old timeline, and 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, you can do that by month three. You launch it, maybe you go to Product Hunt. And then eventually you get to first revenue by month 12 In 2026 you can have an idea or grab an idea from Idea Browser by 9 a.m., have something built by 9:15 a.m., 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 Slop. 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. You're using an agent engineering platform, you're using something like Cloud Code, or there's competitors, too. And you build something comprehensive. Codex has gotten pretty good. Google AI Studio has gotten pretty good. Cloud Code's 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 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 ambient businesses that run with zero or very low daily human input. So having agents monitoring market, identifying opportunities, executing for you, 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 very AI slop stuff. But I do think that this direction, I like to think about it 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. Between 2009 and 2015, that really was the App Store era. People downloaded apps and humans operated them. Then in 2015 to 2024, I think the API economy really started to take over. Developers were wiring APIs together. I believe that 2025 to 2030, the agent economy is here. Agents discovering and hiring other agents on the fly. Fixed text acts dissolving. I actually think that there's a huge startup idea for someone to build the glass door of AI agents. How do you create reputation around agents and who to hire if someone could create a marketplace? Sort of like a multbook that was a social network or is a social network for agents that got acquired by Meta for allegedly $200 million. 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, 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 look at internet products and just create the agent version of it? So I think this market is going to $52 billion in 2030 Today, there's 31,000 agent skills on marketplaces. But they're pretty bad. Most of them are actually garbage. So I think there's a huge opportunity to build skills, build agents, and it's giving me bags under my eyes. So this whole concept of agents hiring agents, CEO agents, sales agents, dev agents, marketing agents, I recently did a tutorial on how to use paperclip, which is, you know, it 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 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 a lot of opportunity there. YC predicts that there's going to be 300-plus unicorns in vertical AI in this decade. So vertical software, huge business. Constellation Software, I think they own 500-plus companies or something like that. They've built SaaS for vertical, in the vertical software space. So super boring workflows in education, in defense, in all sorts of really boring stuff. And there's the same opportunity to build your own Constellation Software, but in vertical AI. So I think that if you're listening to this, thinking about what do you have an unfair advantage, what is your niche that you understand really well? Because I think that the people that are building in the vertical agent map, I think there's just a lot of opportunity. The YCs of the world are going to focus on these big, big categories, insurance, real estate, logistics, elder care, legal health care, 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 vertical categories, start there and then expand from there. There's going to be so much funding into these big categories so you want to pick something that has a little less competition. But I do think that there's a lot of opportunity here. 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 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'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 night and all the opportunities here, I do not know what is. So what are some boring goldmine 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, elder care, government, accounting, construction. You're going to want to pick stuff in these niches, but very, very sub-niche down. And 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 things like that are probably less interesting, but the more boring, the better, and the more niche, the better to start. So SaaS has really evolved in terms of how we've been pricing. So it used to be that you would do per-seat licensing, $50 a user a month or whatever. All these 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%. Huge companies 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 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, the evolution went 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% of enterprise SaaS shifts to outcome-based by 2030 So seat base is going to decline from 21% to 15%. So where's the opportunity? Why is this keeping me up at night? What are ways to go and create outcome-based paper-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, be it cold or even if you're just posting on your email newsletter or on your social media accounts, it's interesting to people, right? So you might be able to sell a lot more. So this whole seat-based versus outcome-based shift is just fascinating. The old way of $100 a seat a month, pay whether you use it or not, you pay 10 seats, you get $1,000 a month, and the value is unclear. I think we've all kind of felt this. There's some, I won't name names, but there's some software that my holding company, Late Checkout, pays for. I'm just like, are we getting the value out of this? We're paying thousands of dollars a month. So this whole idea around maybe you pay $1.50 per resolve ticket, pay only for results, and you have companies like Zendesk, which is pretty big already doing this. 83% of AI native SaaS has already switched. My big point with all this is someone's going to build a billion-dollar business doing nothing but 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 go and build outcome-based startups on your own. Like, why even help them when you could just be incubating yourself?