Noah Kagan, CEO of AppSumo, just sent a memo to his entire company. He didn’t sugarcoat it. AppSumo had a brutal year, lost teammates, lost revenue, and lost some of the joy. He owned it. Then he said something most CEOs write around in seventeen layers of corporate softener:
A friend of mine manages a department at a call center that handles bail bonds. Every Friday, she spends about two hours tracking down numbers scattered across multiple Excel files, pulling them into a single report. It’s tedious, mechanical, and completely automatable.
There’s a question your board is already asking, even if your leadership team isn’t: if AI makes every employee dramatically more productive, what do you need all those employees for?
Every industry will be transformed by AI. Some will evolve. Others will disappear. New ones will be built from scratch. That’s not a prediction. It’s already in progress. The only question that matters now isn’t whether AI will reshape your business. It’s what position you’ll hold when it does.
Most CEOs are playing AI like a defense game. Automate the reports. Trim the headcount. Speed up the support queue. Squeeze a few more points of margin out of the existing business. Check the AI box. Move on.
AI tools like Lovable, Bolt, Vercel, and Replit have done something remarkable: they’ve made software creation nearly frictionless. A founder with an idea and no engineering background can have a working app in twenty minutes. A competitor can replicate your core feature set by Friday afternoon.
There’s a conversation happening in boardrooms right now that goes something like this:
“Are we using AI?”
“Yes, absolutely. The team has ChatGPT.”
And everyone nods. Box checked. Initiative launched. Disruption avoided.
