Observations · AI and Business Since 2022
Small business and entrepreneurship
The leverage available to a tiny team exploded. Tasks that required hires or agencies — copywriting, design, bookkeeping prep, support, basic software — became AI-assisted or AI-done. Stripe's data showed top AI startups reaching $1M revenue in a median 11.5 months, faster than the best SaaS cohort ever.
What drove it
ChatGPT as the universal assistant, open models (Llama, Qwen, Mistral) keeping costs near zero, vibe-coding tools turning ideas into working software, and agent products automating admin.
The evolution
2022
A free assistant that drafts, plans, and explains — the biggest leverage gift to small teams in decades.
- OpenAI launches ChatGPT — the generative AI era begins
It turned years of lab research into a mass-market product overnight and forced every major technology company to respond within weeks. Google declared an internal code red.
2023
Open weights (Llama 2, Mistral) and the GPT platform meant a solo founder could build on frontier AI for almost nothing.
- The first enterprise wave: Salesforce, Morgan Stanley, Bloomberg
Regulated, brand-sensitive industries moved from curiosity to production deployments within four months of ChatGPT's launch.
- Llama 2: open weights become a sanctioned Big Tech strategy
Open weights went from leak to strategy, giving every company a credible free alternative to paid frontier APIs.
- Mistral 7B: Europe's open-weight challenger arrives
A small European startup shipped competitive models months after founding, proving efficient open weights were a viable strategy against US giants.
- OpenAI DevDay: GPT-4 Turbo, custom GPTs, and the platform play
OpenAI pivoted from model vendor to platform company, aiming to own the application layer the way app stores owned mobile.
2024
AI Overviews threatened small-business discovery, while the tooling wave kept shrinking minimum viable headcount.
- Google puts AI Overviews on top of Search
The most consequential change to the web's front door in years, and Google's direct answer to AI-native search rivals.
2025
Vibe coding turned ideas into working software in days, and Stripe's data showed AI startups reaching $1M revenue faster than any cohort before.
- Vibe coding goes mainstream; the Windsurf saga rewrites AI M&A
AI coding tools proved to be generative AI's first killer app — valuable enough to trigger billion-dollar bidding wars.
- China's open-weight wave: Qwen 3, Kimi K2, GLM-4.5, DeepSeek V3.1
China became the center of gravity for open-source AI — frontier-adjacent capability at a fraction of US API prices.
2026
Qwen's billion downloads made world-class AI a free commodity — the leverage is universal; the differentiation is learning speed.
- Qwen nears a billion downloads — and closes its flagship weights
Chinese open models became the global default — while even open-source champions began holding back frontier weights for commercial advantage.
- New Jersey codifies the ABC test as the federal rule stalls
Classification is where the promise of frictionless global hiring meets the ground. A three-prong conjunctive test decided state by state is not a protocol; it is twenty-odd incompatible dialects with the same name. The compliance floor for anyone paying contractors in the US is set here, in state rulemaking, not in a single federal standard.
- Germany starts drafting as the EU platform work deadline nears
The directive was supposed to harmonise platform work across Europe, and in the most important respect it does the opposite: the employment presumption is delegated to twenty-seven national legislatures, each defining its own triggers. A protocol that every implementer configures differently is a standard in name only — and the algorithmic-management provisions arrive on top, reaching further into automated decisions than the AI Act does.
- IMF: Nigeria is 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's stablecoin inflows
This is a multilateral institution, not a vendor, reporting that dollar-denominated stablecoins have become a real payments channel — and the reason is not enthusiasm for the technology. It is that correspondent banking works badly in exactly these corridors. Adoption is highest where the incumbent rails are worst, which is the honest version of the story.
- Visa, M-PESA and Onafriq pilot stablecoin settlement in the DRC
The interesting party here is Visa. When a card network and a mobile money operator run settlement over stablecoins, the technology has stopped being a challenger to the incumbent rails and started being a component inside them. That is usually how infrastructure actually changes — not by replacement, but by quiet substitution one layer down, while the interface the user sees stays the same.
- Premium publisher ad supply falls up to 41% as AI search bites
An ad request is a count of pages actually served, not a modelled estimate of clicks foregone, which makes this one of the cleaner available measurements of what AI-mediated search is doing to the open web. Prices rising on collapsing volume is a yield-led market: publishers are extracting more per impression precisely because there are fewer of them, which is not a durable position.
- Google AI Mode starts acting inside third-party apps
Search has spent twenty-five years as a referral layer: it told you where to go and you went there. Acting inside the destination collapses that step. The visit — the thing publishers, retailers and every content business monetise — becomes optional, and the surface that captures the intent is no longer the one that fulfils it.
Key sources
The papers, announcements, and reports that document this industry's shift. Each also lives in the Library.
What businesses do differently
Solo founders run functions that used to be departments. 'How big does this team really need to be?' became the default planning question. The tiny, AI-leveraged company became a legitimate ambition rather than a constraint.
What this means for founders and leaders
Your effective headcount is your team times the leverage of its tools. Competitors have the same leverage — so speed of learning, not access to AI, is the differentiator that remains.