Business strategist Daniel Priestley explains why AI has created one of the biggest opportunities in a generation for ordinary people to build a profitable business, and why the winners will be the ones who lean into what makes them irreplaceably human.
Priestley’s core argument is that AI has collapsed the cost of building a software company. What used to require 20 or 30 developers, millions in funding, and 10,000 customers can now be done by a tiny team for almost nothing. He points to Steven’s own company rebuilding its entire applicant tracking system in a single week, something that would have cost 500,000 dollars and taken 18 months not long ago. Wildly profitable software companies now exist serving niches of just 500 or 1,000 customers.
But he’s honest about the catch. As these things become easy and free, they also lose value. If everyone can build software or make content, the market value of doing so drops at the same rate it becomes easy. So Priestley keeps returning to a first-principles question: what can I do that is irreplaceably human, that a kid in Mumbai or an AI agent cannot replicate?