Search for AI business ideas and you’ll drown in the same recycled suggestions everyone else gets. That’s not where fortunes are made. The real opportunity isn’t finding another application for AI. It’s discovering problems that nobody even realized were AI problems in the first place.

On the surface, this statement appears to be indefensible. Around the world, companies are injecting billions of dollars into AI precisely because they expect to see value creation—increased efficiency, smarter decisions, innovative products. Yet, the claim holds an important truth. AI does not create value merely by existing.

Dismissing AI as non-intelligent may feel safe, but it carries a hidden implication: much of what humans do might not qualify either. The debate exposes a deeper tension—not about machines, but about how fragile, flexible, and perhaps self‑serving our definition of intelligence really is in practice, especially when it threatens our sense of uniqueness.

What happens when anyone can build software instantly? As AI drives marginal costs to near zero, the industry begins to resemble a gold rush—except the winners may not be the builders. Companies like OpenAI are selling the “picks and shovels,” capturing value while developers face intensifying competition and shrinking margins.

An algorithm tax may seem like a natural response to the rise of AI, but it misunderstands how digital markets work. As software becomes abundant and cheap to produce, competition drives prices and profits toward zero. Instead of generating broad taxable value, AI concentrates economic gains in a few dominant platforms, making taxation far more complex than it appears.