Category
Industry & Markets
How AI rewrites the unit economics of software businesses that run physical-world operations: vertical SaaS, voice agents, local services, PropTech and beyond.
Category
How AI rewrites the unit economics of software businesses that run physical-world operations: vertical SaaS, voice agents, local services, PropTech and beyond.
10 articles in Industry & Markets

Digital agents were the first act. Physical AI is the next product frontier: robots, sensors, factories, vehicles, and supply chains.

Product management is escaping tech. HVAC companies, PE portfolios, regional banks, and schools are about to hire their first PM. The discipline is leaving.

Every useful agent becomes a power user of the SaaS underneath it. Install base explodes, API calls multiply, workflow gets more essential, not less.

AI won't kill all SaaS. It will kill hollow SaaS. The distinction between workflow-embedded platforms and CRUD apps will determine who survives.

The traditional property portal is a database wrapper that shifts the cognitive load entirely onto the buyer. AI is about to collapse that model completely.

What OpenChair's production platform and the OpenTradie prototype taught me about reusable infrastructure, domain depth and AI-native product strategy.

What I learned from prototyping voice reception for service businesses, and the latency, authority and handoff work required before production.

AI's biggest obstacles are not technical. They are structural: professional guilds, regulatory capture, procurement inertia, and incumbents profiting from it.

For decades, companies like CoreLogic built massive moats by accumulating proprietary structured property data. Visual intelligence just evaporated that advantage.

Google is testing native property listings in search. AI broke the constraint that stopped them in 2011. The aggregator model dies when the user is an agent.