Leadership
Building businesses in an age of AI
Why the current technology shift creates opportunities for founders and established businesses — but only where there is a real user problem.
Martin Raeburn28 Aug 2026 · 7 min readAI has lowered the cost of building software capabilities that previously required much larger teams. That changes the economics of experimentation, but it does not remove the need for a real market.
The strongest venture ideas begin with a painful workflow, a valuable decision or a market that can be organised better. AI is useful when it materially changes the economics or experience of solving that problem.
The discipline is to validate before overbuilding: user, problem, route to value, operating constraints and only then the architecture required to deliver it.