I was listening to Why AI Could Be Better for Plumbers than Programmers - The AI Daily Brief and my mind was racing.
NLW talked about someting I wrote about in Long on Quiet AI Companies: the companies winning with AI aren't the ones selling AI, they're the ones using it to quietly do their actual work better.
NLW makes two points I keep thinking about:
First, the trades are finding real leverage with AI. Not as a product, but as a tool in the workflow.
Second, niche/specialized software is can become economically viable to build and deploy.
Both of these are things I'm now living.
We've been using AI in small, unhype-ey ways: RAG searches through stacks of PDF service manuals, cleaning up emails, pulling together sales call lists from messy data. None of it is flashy. All of it helps us move faster on a backlog of services for compressors running the industries that support our community.
And the internal tools we're building? Three years ago, deploying something like this would have required 4-6 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now we can bootstrap a real product.
That's the part the episode gets right that most AI coverage misses: the opportunity isn't in AI-native companies, it's in every boring, essential business that's been held back by operational drag. The plumber isn't competing with ChatGPT. They're using it to stop losing jobs to a missed phone call because they're under a house fixing the drainpipe.