Been telling clients this for 2 years now. The competition is coming, it’s going to be lean and incredibly adaptable
We’re at a fascinating point where there’s a decent thesis for starting new companies from the ground up purely to take full advantage of the leverage you get from AI agents. So much about your typical practices have to be re-engineered to get the greatest output from agents. If you don’t almost completely start your process from scratch you’ll likely cap out early in the gains you can get. We’re seeing this first in the use of AI coding agents, where the workflow becomes far more about clarity of spec writing and prompting than actually writing code. Now the job is far more about the upfront thinking of what you want to build and getting that right, and then reviewing and orchestrating the outputs. This then presents an opportunity not only for new startups that emerge that will build their products in this new way to outrun larger companies, but equally opens up opportunities for new services firms to emerge to bring this engineering leverage to larger customers. The same will be true in almost all other fields. One could imagine new forms of consulting companies focused on getting more output per project, new law firms that can take on far more clients, brand new marketing agencies that can do campaigns entirely faster, and so on. Eventually bigger companies will figure out how to get these gains as well, but for now there’s a clear window for many new firms to emerge that can operate by default in these new ways.

Sep 16, 2025 · 5:57 AM UTC