The New AI Economy Is Banking on You Not Knowing How AI Works
I have started getting irritated by a very specific kind of ad.
You have probably seen them too.
An AI assistant that will organise your life.
Another one that will answer your emails.
One for studying. One for booking. One for writing. One that apparently knows how to run your business better than you do after you answer seven questions and hand over $19.99 a month.
And every time I see another one, I keep thinking the same thing.
Does anybody realise they probably already own this?
Because we have entered a very strange stage of the AI economy where people are being sold individual AI capabilities as though they are individual products.
Sometimes they are.
A lot of the time, they are not.
Sometimes you are paying twenty dollars a month for a prettier place to ask ChatGPT a question.
That is worth understanding before we all end up with eleven subscriptions and no idea what half of them actually do.
Before You Buy Another AI App, Ask What It Actually Does
I am not anti-app.
I need to say that early because somebody will inevitably read this as me suggesting every AI startup is a scam.
That is not the argument.
There are excellent specialist products being built right now. Some connect to systems you already use. Some automate processes beautifully. Some have proprietary information, specialist workflows or industry-specific functions that would be tedious to reproduce yourself.
Those products earn their money.
But that is different from an app whose primary function is taking something a general AI model can already do, putting a nice interface around it and hoping you never ask what is underneath.
And lately I have been asking.
A lot.
If I see an advertisement for an AI assistant, my first question is no longer:
Would this be useful?
Of course it would be useful. That is why the advertisement works.
My question is:
Can I already do this in ChatGPT or Claude?
That changes the shopping experience considerably.
I Think Most People Still Think They Bought a Chatbot
This may be where the confusion starts.
People opened ChatGPT a few years ago and learned that it could write an email.
Then perhaps they got it to write a caption.
Maybe they asked it to explain something their accountant said.
Useful.
But that first impression stuck.
So while these platforms have become substantially more capable, a lot of people are still using them like extremely articulate Google boxes.
That gap between what people think they have and what they actually have access to is now becoming a business opportunity.
For other people.
If you are using a modern general-purpose AI well, you can already ask it to work with documents, analyse information, help organise a project, teach you a subject, build plans, compare options, help prepare meetings, develop processes, critique work, draft communications and act within very specific roles you define.
That does not mean it replaces every piece of software in your business.
It means you should probably check before buying another one.
Your AI Assistant Might Just Be an Instruction
Let us use the AI assistant example because I see this constantly.
You are shown an app with a lovely dashboard.
“Your personal AI business assistant.”
Wonderful.
What does it actually do?
Maybe it remembers information about the business.
Maybe you give it documents.
Maybe it helps draft replies.
Maybe it helps you think through priorities.
Maybe it organises information around a particular role.
All useful.
Now open ChatGPT or Claude and start doing exactly that.
Tell it about the company.
Give it the relevant documents.
Explain the offer.
Give it examples of writing you approve of.
Tell it how you make decisions.
Give it rules.
Tell it what it should challenge you on.
Tell it what it should never do.
Then keep working with it.
You are building an assistant.
It may not have the shiny interface.
It may require a little more thought from you at the beginning.
But that is the part nobody puts in the Instagram ad.
A lot of “AI products” are not selling you intelligence.
They are selling you the setup.
That can still be valuable.
But those are two completely different things.
The Learning Apps Are Even More Obvious
This is probably the category that makes me laugh the most.
I keep seeing AI learning tools advertised as though personalised tutoring has suddenly been invented inside that particular app.
Give ChatGPT or Claude something you are trying to learn.
Then tell it:
Teach this to me as though I know nothing about the subject.
Now test me.
Do not give me the answer immediately.
Figure out which part I do not understand.
Explain that part differently.
Give me another example.
Test me again tomorrow.
Congratulations.
You have a tutor.
And because you can tell it exactly how you learn, how quickly you want to move and what you keep getting wrong, that tutor can become surprisingly specific.
You do not need a separate subscription every time you discover another use for intelligence.
Sometimes you need a better conversation with the intelligence you already have.
Booking Assistants Are Where We Need to Use Our Grown-Up Brains
Now, this is where the internet usually ruins a perfectly sensible argument by turning it into:
“Cancel all your apps. AI does everything.”
No.
That would be ridiculous.
A real booking platform might be processing payments.
It may be managing cancellations.
It may have reminders.
It may deal with multiple employees, different services, different locations and different availability.
It may connect directly with your CRM.
That is infrastructure.
Pay for infrastructure if you need infrastructure.
But if the thing you are paying for is primarily the intelligence layer, arranging information, helping make decisions, drafting communication, preparing follow-up, then I would at least investigate what your existing AI can already handle.
The question is not:
Can AI replace this app?
The question is:
What am I actually paying this app to do?
That is the question I think more business owners need to learn to ask.
There Is Now an Ignorance Premium on AI
This is the bigger issue for me.
We are watching a knowledge gap turn into a pricing model.
The less somebody understands about what ChatGPT, Claude and other general AI systems can already do, the easier it becomes to sell them the same underlying capability over and over again.
Writing assistant.
Research assistant.
Meeting assistant.
Study assistant.
Marketing assistant.
Planning assistant.
Business coach.
Idea generator.
At some point I want to grab the credit card out of your hand.
Because perhaps you need all of those products.
But perhaps you are paying six companies to give six different interfaces to one basic capability you have barely explored in the platform you already use.
That can become expensive remarkably quickly.
And this is where AI literacy suddenly becomes financial literacy.
Not because you need to understand the mathematics behind a large language model.
Most people do not need to know that.
You need to understand enough about the capability to recognise when somebody is repackaging it and selling it back to you.
Free AI Is Already Extremely Capable
This is another thing I think gets lost.
You can start using powerful general AI without paying for it at all.
For many people, the free version is enough to completely change how they work.
Then there are paid tiers.
And this is where I think people sometimes underestimate what they have purchased.
You think you upgraded your chatbot.
What you may actually have done is upgraded your capacity.
You have something that can help you think.
Research.
Draft.
Organise.
Analyse.
Plan.
Teach.
Challenge.
Prepare.
Translate.
Structure.
And increasingly work across more complicated sets of information.
That is an extraordinary amount of capability sitting inside one subscription.
So when another ad appears offering me an AI app for $19.99 a month, I now have a little ritual.
I open the AI I already pay for and ask it whether we can do the same thing.
You would be amazed how often the answer is yes.
Sometimes the App Wins
And this is important.
Sometimes I test the idea and realise I absolutely want the specialist software.
Good.
Now I know why.
Maybe it saves me three hours.
Maybe the integration is beautiful.
Maybe it automates something I do not want to manually manage.
Maybe multiple staff members need to use it.
Maybe there are security or compliance requirements.
Maybe somebody has simply designed a better experience than I could cobble together myself.
Fantastic.
That company deserves the subscription.
This is not about becoming cheap.
It is about becoming informed.
I have no objection to paying for software.
I object to paying for software because I did not know what I already had.
Weak AI Products Have a Literacy Problem Coming
This is the part I think will become very interesting over the next couple of years.
The better ordinary people become at using general AI, the harder it will become to sell thin AI products.
A pretty dashboard will not be enough.
A clever prompt hidden behind a button will not be enough.
“Powered by AI” definitely will not be enough.
Products will have to earn their position.
Real workflow.
Real infrastructure.
Real specialist knowledge.
Real integrations.
Real convenience.
Real outcomes.
Because once consumers understand the underlying technology, the wrapper has to justify itself.
That is healthy.
AI literacy will destroy some AI businesses.
It will make the good ones much better.
Do Not Buy AI Before You Ask AI
So this is becoming my rule.
Before you buy another AI app, describe the job to ChatGPT or Claude.
Not the product.
The job.
“I need something that keeps track of new enquiries, helps me decide who needs follow-up, drafts responses and prepares me before the next conversation. How much of that can I already do here, what would require integrations and where would specialist software genuinely make sense?”
Now you are shopping intelligently.
You have changed the relationship.
You are no longer standing outside the technology being told what you need.
You understand enough to interrogate the offer.
That is where I think the advantage is going to sit in this next economy.
Not with the person who collects the most AI tools.
With the person who knows what the hell they already do.
Because some of the new AI economy will genuinely change your life.
Some of it will build enormous companies.
Some of it will solve problems we could barely touch five years ago.
And some of it is a $19.99 subscription sitting between you and a question you could have asked ChatGPT yourself.
Learn the difference before you hand over the card.
