Picture this. You used to pay for a grammar app. Then Large Language Models (LLMs) showed up, and one day you realized you hadn't opened that app in months. You didn't even cancel it like a responsible adult. You just ghosted, yah, we all did. No breakup text, nothing. You just bounced. And here is the part that should worry every one of us building AI products today. That grammar app did nothing wrong. It just stopped being needed, which is honestly a worse way to go out of business than being bad at your job.
Rewind a bit. Remember the old internet, back when every task had its own website and every website did exactly one job? One site for translation. One for grammar. One for sentiment analysis. A whole Q/A forum, people could ask questions and other strangers could argue about the answer … hahaha. A calendar app that only did calendars, as if that was a full time job. Search, video, and email were separate kingdoms with their own logins, their own passwords you forgot, and their own “forgot password” emails clogging your inbox. That made sense back then. Building software was hard, so everyone picked one lane, stayed in it, and called it a business model.
Today, one model can translate, write, check your grammar, summarize your meeting, chat with you at 2am. LLMs today make video, music, voice, and full presentations, basically doing the job of five different subscriptions you forgot you were still paying for. This is not a small upgrade. It is a different game, and most of us are still playing by the old rules like it's 2015. That some refuse to use AI, just because you cant see it doesn’t mean you arent using it -hahaha.
This is already showing up in real numbers, not just vibes and hot takes. Jasper AI hit a 1.5 billion dollar valuation as an AI writing tool. Then the big models added the same writing features for free, and Jasper's revenue roughly cut in half, which is the corporate version of watching your date check their phone. Otter and other meeting note apps built entire businesses around summarizing calls. Then Zoom, Teams, and Google Meet quietly added the same summaries right inside the tools people were already using anyway. Nobody stole those companies' lunch on purpose. The bigger platform just added a button, and the smaller app quietly lost its reason to exist, like a middle child nobody remembers to invite anymore.
Let's look at the “creatives” space. A few years ago, producing a track meant paying for a beat licensing platform, hiring a freelancer on Fiverr for mixing, and maybe using a separate app for lyric generation. Now? Multimodal AI doesn't just read and write, it listens, composes, and produces. You can prompt a model to generate the lyrics, compose the backing track, and master the audio all in the same browser tab. The “one app, one format” business model is being obliterated in real time. If your entire startup relies on being just one isolated step in a user's creative pipeline, a generalized AI model is going to swallow that pipeline whole. What used to be a fragmented, five subscription workflow is now just a Tuesday afternoon inside a single text box.
Right now, a lot of small AI builders are still alive simply because the big “guns” have not gotten around to them yet. Not because anyone is protected. You are just not on the menu today. Check back tomorrow. And these big labs keep adding more “experts” and “agents” for music, teaching, coding, writing, image editing, basically assembling an entire office of imaginary employees inside one app. Every new expert they add is a category that used to be somebody's entire company and somebody's entire personality on LinkedIn.
So here is my simple thought, free of charge. If a big AI company added your exact feature for free next month, would your users leave you the next day? If yes, congratulations, you are not running a company. You are running an unpaid focus group for a feature they have not shipped yet. So what actually protects you? Not your prompt, that is for sure. Anyone can copy a prompt in an afternoon, over lunch, without even finishing their kikomando. What protects you is what only you know. Your own data. Your own workflow. The kind of knowledge that lives in your head and in your customers' habits, not in some public dataset a model was trained on somewhere in a data center you will never see.
Now, this is not a call to go full and try to train a million-billion parameter model in your company hideout. You don't have to build the engine from scratch. Leverage the open source ecosystem, build on top of models like Llama or Mistral to keep your options open and avoid vendor lock-in. But guard your proprietary workflow with your life. The fine-tuned data loops, the hyper-specific user habits you capture, your seamless integration into a niche, messy legacy industry, that is your actual trade secret. Your core IP should never sit as plain text in the API logs of the very mega-corp whose model you are building on top of. That is not paranoia. That is just reading the room. Open source models belong to everyone, but your competitive edge is not a gift you hand out.
Look at the current tech, and here is the future I see. Almost every major product today, email, video platforms, spreadsheets, presentation tools, has quietly plugged in its own LLM, like everyone showed up to the same party wearing the same outfit and pretending it was a coincidence. Each company is racing to build its own smart assistant inside its own product. But that is just the middle step, a costume change before the real show. The direction is obvious. All these separate LLMs bolted onto separate products are slowly merging into one place. Soon you will load a single LLM and, from that one spot, reach your email, your calendar, your documents, your spreadsheets, your videos, your music, everything you currently visit ten different sites/LLMs and remember ten different passwords for.
So if you are building something today, do not build the button. Everyone can build a button, and someone with more money than you will build a shinier one next quarter. Build the thing a giant company genuinely cannot copy overnight, your data, your relationships, your specific way of solving one real problem for real people. The tide is coming in fast, and thin ideas float away first. Don't let yours be one of them.
