ai & m&a. building practical ai for non-technical businesses. early team at laskie (acq. by @x). tampa/philly/nyc.
Tampa, FL
Joined January 2020
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this is what people keep missing about AI.
demand for intelligence is going to explode. but that doesn’t mean the companies supplying it will capture most of the value. competition will keep driving the price of intelligence toward zero.
the winners will be businesses that benefit from cheaper intelligence. the losers will be those whose margins depend on intelligence staying expensive.
Everyone keeps saying SaaS is dead and agents will eat software.
Maybe.
But eating software isn't the same as getting paid for it.
If agents make software nearly free, the winner is whoever was paying for the software, not whoever replaced it.
you either die an ai startup or live long enough to see a regional hvac company eat your lunch with the same api
"ai strategy" at a normal business is mostly: find the 20-hour task that everyone hates, get it to 1 hour, and don't make anyone learn a new app
the models are 1% of the spend. the rest is someone getting ai to actually work inside normal companies. i think thousands of 50-500 person businesses end up paying an outside firm to run it for them.
this is why i think ai managed services will be huge.
companies will keep business-critical saas (crm, erp, billing), build custom apps on top, and get rid of saas bloat like BI dashboards, project mgmt tools, expense approval, the list goes on.
but building is the easy part now. maintaining it is what never ends.
there are tens of thousands of businesses with 50-500 employees who have no idea how they should be using ai, don't want to learn, and will gladly pay someone who does to manage all or some of it - usage, build, deployment, maintenance.
4 months ago I cloned Airtable for a client in 5 days because they refused to pay Airtable $500/mo
months later, I’m still maintaining it
every two weeks it’s another edge case, a UI tweak, or a "quick 10-minute request." They’ve easily spent 10x more in headaches than the $2,000 they would’ve paid Airtable
just proving that SaaS isn't dead. Cloning isn't enough, if you want it to be same quality as original it becomes a full time job
and at this point isn't it easier to just pay?
the catch is openai and anthropic both just launched services arms for the mid-market, and the low end is upwork at $30/hr. what's left is boring back-office work at firms where trust matters more than brand. they don't buy ai, they buy a smaller bpo bill
I think it's the best time ever to walk into a business who has hardly any automations and get paid a huge check to help them automate everything. I believe trillions are on the table in the next 5-10 years as a forward deployed engineer.
xitter.cf/guilleflorvs/status/21…
450 PMs and 20 apps later, the conclusion is still "put a text box in it." @tszzl was right in 2022
Atlassian's Head of AI @sherifmansour runs AI across 20+ apps and 450 PMs. 5M+ users now use those apps for the AI.
3 things Atlassian learned doing it, mostly against the standard advice:
#1. Ship chat in your product, even if it feels redundant.
Two years ago this was controversial inside @Atlassian. They assumed chat was temporary and customers would just use ChatGPT or Claude Code.
That was wrong. Millions use Rovo chat every day. People use the AI closest to their work.
Chat also told them what to build. Users kept asking it to group whiteboard sticky notes into themes, so that became a feature. They kept asking to push notes into a Jira backlog, so that became a workflow. Then each one got exposed as a tool for agents, on and off Atlassian via MCP.
#2. Bolt AI onto what you already have.
Everyone says don't. Atlassian did it 2.5 years ago: one new box in the Jira workflow designer that says "use an agent here."
Customers then chained agents together on workflows they already ran with humans. Ticket comes in, an agent picks it up, a marketing agent generates assets in Canva, a social agent posts them.
The rule now across every product: anything you can do with a human, you can do with an agent. Mention it, assign it a ticket, add it to a workflow.
#3. "Everyone becomes an AI builder" didn't hold up at scale.
Atlassian staffed about 10 teams with hand-picked builders, including PMs and designers who code with AI. They were very fast for a few weeks. Then they stalled. Everyone was rowing and no one was steering.
The PM/design-to-engineer ratio is 1:10. With AI it feels like 1:30 or 1:40. If the PM is vibe coding, nobody is deciding what to build.
They also flipped hiring: more juniors, more seniors, fewer in the middle. Juniors are nearly 2x as likely to experiment with AI. Seniors are better at catching the slop. Atlassian puts them in the same room for 4 days every couple of months.
If you have an existing B2B product with daily users, you don't have to start over. Ship chat, read the prompts, and bolt agents onto the workflows your customers already run.
youtube.com/watch?v=XQcthndW…
shipped my first thing to prod this week. not an engineer, zero lines of code written by me. tested restores, gated every deploy, did everything the reply guys said i wouldn't
24 hours later it tried to write a backup into a read-only folder
prod is the great equalizer. it humbles slop and artisanal code alike
every saas subscription is now a build vs buy question where build costs one afternoon and a claude max plan
this is a mac mini with a gpu tax and a story about ownership. the open models are mid, the box is $3500, and the actual product is not having to set up ollama yourself
Introducing Core, The Personal Al Computer
The most powerful technology humanity has built should belong to you
Order today: ghost.ai
Greg McL retweeted
He is probably ahead of 90% of people in the real world.
You were doing this by February.
We are still early.
Wildest AI experience I've ever had, just now!
Opened Claude on my phone and started talking:
I told it to go into google drive and edit my task list on google sheets by reviewing my emails for the last week - and asked it to also create a new column for the date each task was last updated, separate each task by property, and to color-code based on priority.
Looked over at my laptop, and the spreadsheet came alive! It was changing in front of my eyes without me lifting a finger.
MIND. BLOWN.
companies have no idea how much ai they’re actually using. products, employee tools, vendors, random workflows nobody owns. eventually someone important is going to ask what all of it is doing and the answer will be a spreadsheet nobody has updated in six months
AI did not just make content cheap.
It made a lot of business “moats” legibly fake.
After spending time around companies being bought, sold, and valued, I keep coming back to one question:
If someone showed up tomorrow with $100M and the best AI tools money can rent, how long would this business last?
I think only 4 assets really survive that test:
trust, access, proprietary data, and a license.
Wrote about why here: xitter.cf/GregSMcLaughlin/status…
