There is something that will never change for being a founder, you need to sell, and for that you need network and credibility. It was never about the building, its all about the selling. AI has not changed that.
But it has. AI can help you do market research, develop buyer personas, evaluate potential customers, create, analyze and enrich prospect lists, evaluate marketing channels, create ad copy, write sales scripts, think through objections and how to respond, etc.
Will it turn you into Jordan Belfort? No. Will it be 100% successful or effective? No. But can it help enough to make a difference? Sure, in enough cases.
AI is a tool. A starting point. A feedback mechanism. It's not the end all or be all.
I am positive this will settle down at some point, but the difference will always remain about your own abilities, not that of AI.
In many markets, yes. If you're a software buyer, for example, your inbox, LinkedIn, etc. is filled with AI-generated sales outreach. And you know it's AI.
But keep in mind that there are tons of markets (think local services) where buyers aren't familiar with AI. They don't know that what they're reading was produced by AI, and they wouldn't care.
In these markets, if you use AI, you have a realistic shot at being "better" than your competition, and if you use it even a little bit more effectively, it can make a real difference.
It does not matter of they are drowning in it. If their inbox is filled with slop pitches, whether AI or not, they will stop reading.
The music business is really the perfect example.
You can argue it has never been easier to break through in music.
You can also argue that it has never been more difficult.
I think what all this ultimately does is make it harder for the person who would have been doing the activity regardless.
There are a few on the margins that would not have had opportunity but now do. Most of those though are just noise generators making life more difficult for the person who would have been there either way.
There is no shortcut to hardwork, but llms somehow have people thinking that is the cases, it plays so well into people's desire to be as lazy as possible.
I know a small business that generates many of their leads by responding to posts on social media. They recently started using AI to create personalized comments responding to these posts instead of generic comment templates they used before. The number of leads they're generating from their social media commenting has skyrocketed.
Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn are flooded with AI content. A lot of it is "slop", yes, and it's kind of annoying if you know where it came from, but you're missing the big picture if you deny the reality, which is that if AI content is created in a way where it does have some value, average people appreciate the value and don't have some ideological hang-up over how it was created.
AI is just a tool. It can produce absolute rubbish, but it can also produce some decent stuff too.
Nor did the web, or mobile, or any other innovation. That doesn't mean you can't build your business around an innovation.
This is like when AI bros claim that AI has changed absolutely everything for their project but the first thing they do is reach for docker compose, react and postgres. Why don't you forget the bloat and have your LLM make your container, vdom differ and lightweight DB?
It's very surreal to have to point this out.
To sell something to the masses you fundamentally need a product to sell. Agreed.
And you fundamentally need a way to find the customers for that product that need it at the time.
And you fundamentally need a way to interact with those customers that can persuade them to use your product.
Lots of aspects are vitally important to the overall success.