What Services Should You Build in the AI Era

The Question That Keeps Me Up

AI writes code. AI does design. AI makes presentations. It even draws 3D blueprints.

So what exactly should developers be doing?

Before, your competitive edge was being “the person who can build this.” But now AI builds everything. A website? Ask AI. An app? Same story. Since tools like Cursor came along, the barrier to entry for coding has dropped dramatically.

When Anyone Can Build Anything

The differentiator isn’t “what you can build” anymore — it’s “what data you have.”

Think about it. If everyone uses the same AI tools, the output quality converges. Ask GPT to build a shopping site, and you’ll get something that looks like every other AI-generated shopping site. No differentiation.

But if you have 10 years of domain-specific data? A model trained on that data? That’s something nobody else can replicate.

Premium Data Is the Competitive Moat

The services that will survive the AI era look something like this:

Services with specialized domain data. Healthcare, legal, finance, manufacturing — services that have accumulated years of industry-specific data are hard to replace no matter how advanced AI gets.

Platforms where users continuously generate data. The more people use it, the more data accumulates, and the accumulated data makes the service better. Once this flywheel is spinning, late entrants struggle to catch up.

Services connected to the physical world. What AI can’t do is interface with reality. Sensor data, logistics, store operations… Like when I built a kiosk with a Raspberry Pi, services at the intersection of hardware and software can’t be replaced by AI alone.

But Then Reality Sets In

The theory sounds great. Reality is a different story.

Collecting 10 years of data takes… 10 years. That doesn’t help with the service you need to launch tomorrow. So what can you actually do right now? Start small in a specific domain.

Looking back on 20 years of development, the technology landscape has always been shifting. Every time, I worried about “what should I do next,” and the answer was always the same: just build something.

The AI era is no different. The only change is that “what to build” now demands deeper thinking. Building has become easy, which makes choosing what to build that much more important.