The scale of this shift is insane. Money floods the market. Founders either adapt or watch from the sidelines as someone else rewrites the rules.
But here’s the punchline: walk into a real estate agency with a working AI assistant, and you hit a wall. The tech performs. The business doesn’t use it. Agencies lose 30% of leads simply by ignoring clients, and still say they “don’t believe in AI.” Okay.
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Three cracks run through the industry:
• “AI is a bubble.”
• Last-mile projects, the ones that actually change business, starve for funding.
• Trust is built not on experience, but on superstition.
Boom or Bubble
Valuations fly 50x over revenue. Profit is a distant rumor. Feels like the dot-com era. Everyone is betting that every startup is the next Amazon. And, by the way, those who believed the internet would change everything were right.
Is AI a bubble? Too early to know. What’s clear: not everyone survives. Investors call it the “valley of death.”Founders who build real stuff have a chance.
I remember that enthusiasm from the early 2000s, when I was building my first websites. That path led to classifieds and CIAN, and its unicorn IPO on the NYSE. Three years ago, I stopped sleeping again — this time because of AI. That’s why we launched Placy.
AI is the most significant economic breakthrough I’ve ever witnessed. I couldn’t sleep again, just like 25 years ago.
The Last Mile
A journalist recently asked me which LLMs Placy uses and which languages our bots speak. Good discussion. But none of it matters.
Tech works now. Accurate, doesn’t hallucinate (well, almost). Not a single client asks if we run on OpenAI or Anthropic. They ask: Will it work for me?
Meanwhile, 90% of AI-related investment goes to 10% of companies, the foundation models and infra. Thousands of small teams building real AI agents in healthcare, logistics, real estate, etc, they raise just crumbs of real investments. Startups get squeezed hard:
• Funding flows to giants. Last-mile teams live in the real economy, close to bootstrapping.
• Legacy businesses move like glaciers. B2B integrations take months, not days.
But without last-mile distribution, no “AI revolution” happens!
Tech doesn’t fail. Adoption does.
A bank director showed me stats 20 years ago. People received salaries on their Visa and Mastercards, and immediately withdrew all the money from ATMs to pay cash. The tech was ready. Trust wasn’t.
Same today. Businesses are fucked by lost CRM passwords, missing WhatsApp logins, and sysadmins on vacation. And those “believe/don’t believe” rituals kill tech faster than any bug. Trust is the real bottleneck.
Choosing an AI assistant is only step one. The hard part is people and their old-school “but we’ve always done it like this.”
Who Bridges the Gaps
This is where the next winners appear: not those who build larger models, but those who close the gaps: make money real, redistribute capital, build trust.
The next wave won’t be led by OpenAI or Nvidia. It’ll be founders in the field who speak the client’s language and deliver tech to the last mile.
That’s the true moat. Not algorithms — relationships.
