For most of modern history, tech value flowed uphill. Big breakthroughs served big players — governments, multinationals, Wall Street. But GenAI flipped the value curve.
Now, the most powerful users of cutting-edge AI aren’t enterprises. They’re people — solo devs, indie hackers, creators, and two-person startups with no budget and no legal department.
🧠 GenAI changes who wins
Before GenAI:
| Innovation | Early Winners |
|---|---|
| Electricity | Utilities & Factories |
| Internet | ISPs & Big Tech |
| Cloud computing | SaaS Giants |
With GenAI:
| Tool | Early Winners |
|---|---|
| GPT / Claude / Mistral | Indie builders, devs, writers |
| Open-source small models | Hackers, solopreneurs |
| Agent frameworks (AutoGen) | 2-person startups |
Generative AI doesn’t require a team, office, or VC funding to build with. All you need is an API key, curiosity, and some caffeine.
🚀 Individuals 10x. Corporations get compliance forms.
A solo builder gets superpowers. A big company gets procurement meetings.
| Task | Solo Builder | Corporation |
|---|---|---|
| Launch AI tool | Weekend hack + Substack post | 6-month roadmap + GRC checklist |
| Add chatbot | Drop API key + Zapier | Legal review + 3rd-party vendor |
| Automate workflows | GPT + Airtable + Make | ERP integration hell |
| Train staff | Just use ChatGPT | Custom LMS contracts |
McKinsey reports only 1% of large enterprises consider themselves “AI mature.” Why? Bureaucracy, brand risk, internal resistance.
Meanwhile, solo builders just ship.
🧰 The GenAI-native tech stack is indie-first
Legacy enterprise stacks:
- SAP
- Salesforce
- Manual workflows
- “Digital transformation” projects
GenAI-native stack:
- GPT-4o, Claude, Mixtral
- LangChain / OpenDevin
- Pinecone / Chroma
- Vercel / Railway
- Notion + Make + Zapier
- Copilot or Replit Ghostwriter
This isn’t just cheaper — it’s faster, composable, and can be run by one person on a laptop.
🧑💼 One person = one department
AI lets one individual replace entire business functions.
| Department | Replaced by |
|---|---|
| Customer support | GPT chatbot + vector search |
| Marketing | ChatGPT, Midjourney, Meta Ads |
| Legal | Claude + Legalese interpreter |
| QA | Code agents + self-healing test scripts |
| Sales | Voice AI + email agents |
| HR | Onboarding chatbots + payroll automations |
A solo dev is no longer a lone wolf — they’re leading a team of AI agents working 24/7.
📈 Real-world proof: Tiny teams, big outcomes
- Midjourney → ~$200M revenue, ~100 employees
- Perplexity AI → 38 employees, 500M+ users
- Dozens of AI-native startups launching with <10 staff and raising millions
Even Sam Altman predicts the rise of one-person unicorns. Carta shows over 35% of funded startups in 2024 had just one founder.
The edge isn’t capital anymore — it’s velocity + leverage.
🧨 Why corporations are falling behind
| Company Size | Productivity Gain from GenAI |
|---|---|
| Solo Builder | 10x–20x |
| Small Team | 3x–5x |
| Enterprise | 1.1x–1.3x (if adopted well) |
Big companies are held back by:
- Legacy systems
- Siloed data
- Legal & compliance risk
- Risk-averse culture
- IT bottlenecks
The same scale that once gave them power now creates drag.
🔮 What happens next?
| Year | Prediction |
|---|---|
| 2025 | Agent-native micro-SaaS hits $10M ARR with 2-person team |
| 2026 | First one-person unicorn becomes reality |
| 2027 | Corporations start acquiring AI-native startups just to stay competitive |
💡 What should you do?
You don’t need permission. You need a prompt, a keyboard, and a pain point you know intimately.
Start here:
- Automate something you do every week
- Build a niche tool powered by open models
- Replace 1 task with an AI agent
- Launch fast, iterate faster
The value curve is steep — but only at the start. This is your entry window.
🧭 Final thought
GenAI isn’t enterprise-first. It’s imagination-first.
It rewards clarity, speed, and experimentation.
That’s why the biggest winners won’t be companies. They’ll be people.
Jetpacks don’t work in committees.
About the author
Mikhail Liublin writes about AI-native creativity, future-of-work trends, and why the best tech stories today are being written by solo builders, not boardrooms.
Top comments (4)
This is easily one of the mosst naive misreepresentations of anything going on with AI right now.
AI is a bubble that is only this accessible right now because AI companies are trying to create a market and hoping to build an oligopoly before any more competitors can make it into the market.
Everyone's usage of AI tools is currently paid for in large parts by investors and market hype. The moment people start to think it might be time for a return on their investments, all the freedom and accessibility will quickly disappear; prices will go up and if everything works out as expected, Development will have become an industry that relies heavily on a small industry.
Individuals are never benefited in the long trem by big market shifts. There's alway chances for opportunism; for individuals to make a good living off the scrapes as the status quo shifts.
But ultimately, only one thing is happening here: Developers will no longer own the means of production.
You’re right, AI today is cheap because it’s funded by hype. Prices will go up, and big players may lock it down.
But right now, anyone can build with powerful tools. That kind of access is rare.
At the same time, open-source and decentralized AI is growing fast. People are already running strong models locally, with no gatekeepers.
The future might get closed off - but today, it’s wide open.
Couldn’t agree more, GenAI lets me ship ideas solo that would've needed a whole team before. What’s one AI-powered thing you built lately that surprised you?
Now is the time! Me personally I write 100% of the code with AI, and my engineers switching to it as well