The Birth of a Million Tiny Empires

We’ve heard the drumbeat for years now: AI is coming for your job. And honestly? It probably is. But the story everyone’s missing is what comes next — and it’s not mass unemployment. It’s mass entrepreneurship.

Here’s the thing about barriers to entry: they used to be enormous. Starting a business meant hiring developers, designers, accountants, marketers, and lawyers before you ever earned a dollar. That entire stack is collapsing. A single person with a laptop and an AI subscription can now do what used to require a 15-person team and six months of runway.

We’re watching the cost of starting a business approach zero in real time. Need a brand? Generate it. Need a landing page? Built in an afternoon. Need customer support at scale? Automated. Need legal docs? Drafted. The moat that protected large companies — operational complexity — is evaporating.

So yes, AI will displace roles. Entire categories of work will shrink or vanish. But the same technology that eliminates those jobs hands every displaced worker something unprecedented: the tools to go solo. The person who used to manage a company’s social media can now run their own agency of one. The analyst who got laid off can build and sell dashboards as a product. The customer support rep can launch a niche e-commerce brand without touching inventory.

What we’re heading toward isn’t a jobless future. It’s an employer-less future — where millions of people stop renting out their time and start owning what they build. The friction that kept people trapped in traditional employment is the same friction AI is dissolving.

The wave is already starting. The number of single-person businesses generating over $1M in revenue has been climbing for years, and AI is about to pour gasoline on that trend.

The real disruption isn’t that machines replace workers. It’s that workers replace companies.