You Were Getting Replaced With AI, Now You're Replacing Tech Companies With It

You were getting replaced with AI by tech companies, but now you're starting to replace tech companies with AI. Things are getting unreal. What a plot twist.

So what's going on? Let me walk you through it.

Something clicked for a lot of people. I talked about all of the open source Adobe replacement products, and millions of you watched it. That tells me one thing. People are tired of paying for software, and they are actively looking for a way out.

And it did not start there. Before that, one guy used a chatbot to literally write graphics card drivers for old Nvidia cards, so those cards could work on operating systems they were never designed to work on. Think about that for a second. Drivers are the kind of thing that used to need a deep, specialized skill set, and a regular person got there with a chatbot.

Oh, and the PS5 can apparently run PS2 games now. It all comes back to the same reason.

Companies went all in on AI so that they could need fewer people. That was the plan. Smaller teams, lower costs, more profit.

But the same tools landed in everyone's hands. Not just the companies, everyone. And when software becomes this easy to build, guess what? The first thing people build is a free version of whatever they're tired of renting.

That makes sense when you think about it. Everyone has that one subscription they pay for every month and quietly resent. The moment building an alternative gets easy enough, that is the first project people reach for. Nobody needs a business plan for it. They just need a weekend, a chatbot, and a little bit of frustration.

Companies decided that they didn't need their workers. Now customers are deciding they don't need the companies. At this point, it's almost poetic.

The same technology that was supposed to shrink the workforce is now shrinking the distance between a customer and the product they wanted all along.

Is Adobe Dying Tomorrow? No. Let's be real about this. Adobe has an actual moat. It's their software. It's habits. It's all the schools teaching it, the enterprise contracts, the workflows that entire teams have built around it. You don't walk away from all of that overnight.

But the moat is getting a little bit smaller this month, and everybody sees it online. Every open source alternative that gets better makes the next person a little more willing to try it. Every free tool that handles a job people used to pay for makes the price tag a little harder to justify.

My Take

Think what you will about AI, but the options are AI coming for your job or AI coming for a few subscription empires. And you know what? I know which one I'm going to be rooting for.

So here's my question for you. What subscription do you think gets replaced next? Let me know in the comments.

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© Muhammad Usman
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