# Building AI-Proof Business Models for 2027

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-11-04

## Transcript

We need to talk about how in an AI world, you can basically build any business, press a button and boom, right?
So for anyone who's kind of a little bit anxious about what that world looks like, right?
And who want to basically build an asset, who want to create income for themselves, who want to build a business, scale a business, have that whole experience.
What do AI proof businesses actually look at?
So by the end of this episode, I'm going to cover all of that.
And I just want to get your brains thinking about where the world is going.
How do you think about AI proof businesses?
What does that even mean?
And just get your gears turning on it because let's be honest, pretty much everyone has a little bit of anxiety around how to create an AI proof business right now.
Even when you're speaking to incumbents, companies that have billions of dollars of revenue, they're kind of like, oh my God, you know, is, you know, big.
Frontier Lab going to come after me.
So today's episode is just going to be thinking about how you should be thinking about this.
So this is for anyone who's interested in building a business 2027 and beyond.
Let's go.
We'll start actually with, you know, Adams businesses.
So what do I mean by Adams?
You have pixel businesses, the software businesses, then you have Adams.
These are physical businesses.
And when you think about a physical business, Coffee shop, you've got to come in, people want coffee.
Or a plumber, your toilet gets clogged, AI is not going to be able to fix that leak.
These are the sorts of businesses that aren't going anywhere.
And you can actually make the argument that these businesses' valuations are going to go up from here.
Because you're going to have a lot of that AI, tech money.
trying to get in here once they see the moat and the opportunity.
So I think you're starting to see a little bit of that.
I don't know about you, I just see tons of content around boring businesses.
People are trying to get into it.
It's harder to do physical businesses, but those physical businesses AI can't clone overnight.
The second is businesses that require some permission.
What do I mean by that?
I mean licenses.
I mean regulation.
And I also mean if you have the ability, if you're likable or you have connections or you can use GrokBot or whatever to actually get you in front of the right people.
to go and create a deal with a larger company and they help sell your product, that is a partnership that can't be copied on day one.
So what do I mean by that?
Maybe you have an agency and you partner with Salesforce and you're one of their preferred vendors or you're a preferred vendor of Microsoft.
or it doesn't even need to be that big, just a preferred vendor of a medium-sized company, ideally a large-sized company, but a medium to large-sized company.
That is something that people can clone.
Licenses, what do I mean by that?
I mean that there's some businesses that you need a license to operate.
There's some businesses that are regulated, and not everyone could go and do that.
What's an example?
If you want to own, I think, a bookkeeping firm, you have to, in some countries, have been educated a certain way.
If you want to own a law firm, in some countries, you actually have to be a lawyer.
So maybe you partner with a lawyer.
And you handle the marketing and growth side and the AI side.
And they handle running the law firm.
These are the sorts of things to help.
I'm just trying to get your creative juices this entire episode flowing so that you can start thinking about, okay, if I am going to start a new business, how do I make it as AI-proof as possible?
Attention.
Somehow attention...
is underrated right now.
People follow people.
And in a world where AI exists, if you have the right systems there, they can make your organic content, you can go and create more organic content.
I was one of those people that hated short form video.
I mean, I like to consume it, but I hated it from a creation standpoint.
I never liked doing it.
I hated the editing around it.
Now I have Opus 5.5.
as my editor.
And I can go and create Shoreform on the fly when it works for me in my schedule.
And I've actually been quite enjoying it.
And just over the last week, I've gotten literally hundreds of thousands of views on that content, which is really cool.
And people saying it's valuable.
So there is literally no excuse in 2026, 2027 to create I'm talking about a machine that is creating media.
And I believe that media is somehow underrated right now.
I'm talking about newsletters, I'm talking about meme pages, I'm talking about founder-led content.
We all know that distribution is king and I'm not talking about just creating one page, I'm talking about creating a media company.
those businesses are going to do tremendous over the next few years.
And to a certain extent, they're somewhat AI-proof.
Of course, there's some versions of media that could be replaceable.
But the idea is, if your goal is to create a good media company, you are...
trying to create an irreplaceable, trustworthy brand that people come to for your niche.
So I think the way to think about attention is, what is your micro-niche?
What is your niche?
How do you create a machine around it?
How do you use AI to amplify you?
And you don't necessarily need to be the face, necessarily need to do founder-led content, but it does help when you have a human being in front doing it.
The next is timing.
So timing, what did I mean by this?
I just basically mean that you're seeing more and more trends for different micro niches and niches now than ever.
And I think that there's an opportunity to use something like ideabrowser.com, use something like a GrockBot, use something like a Claude Duo.
any personal agent platform that you want to use to go and monitor for trends in your niches, in your micro niches, and go and build something as the first mover advantage.
Sometimes I am shocked when you're early on a trend how few people have actually gone and built something for these people.
Okay, what am I talking about with building?
It could be a software product.
It could be a physical product.
It could be a media company.
It could be an Atom here, a physical thing.
We're going to talk about other things too, like marketplaces and data and stuff like that.
It could be one of those.
But the point I'm trying to make around trends is being a first mover advantage allows you to collect data, to collect...
insights around a particular micro niche or niche.
And from that, your initial product might not be AI-proof.
It might not be an AI-proof idea.
In fact, it might be the least AI-proof.
But what it is AI-proof is the data and the brand and the people that you end up collecting into this, that trust that you build, that brand loyalty that you build.
And I think there's a ton of opportunity to go and look at trends.
And I just believe that everyone should be doing this.
Everyone should be creating machines, systems around finding trends, acting on trends, and ones that they believe that they can add value to.
To me, this is a no-brainer.
Belonging.
Now more than ever, people are as connected as ever, but they're feeling as disconnected than ever.
People want to be with people, and there's tremendous opportunities to build AI-proof businesses around that sense of belonging.
That could be something like paid communities.
That's something like a circle or a school or just a weekly virtual event where you're keeping people accountable.
When you think about belonging, you're thinking about a goal that this community has and shared interests that they have.
They want to hit that goal around that shared interest fast.
with someone else, with that accountability, having fun, entertainment.
So there's so many niches and micro niches where there's an opportunity to charge people to help them go and do that.
So that could be IRL.
You can just do a full IRL experience.
My friend Sam Parr has his company Hampton, which is not affiliated at all.
But what they do is...
From what I understand, meetups around North America for entrepreneurs.
Sort of like AA for entrepreneurs that do at least, let's say, $3 million a year in revenue.
I think that's really cool and that's a really big opportunity.
What is the Hampton for XYZ?
What is that paid community that people would be willing to spend?
Hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars.
And then you, as the host, are helping them.
Well, you're helping curate the group, and you're also helping them move along their journey.
So virtual and also IRL events.
There's just so much opportunity in IRL events.
We just threw an IRL event, was it last week?
In Nashville, bringing around...
founders who are interested in deploying agents to build their businesses.
We had so much demand, we didn't really know even how to meet it.
I think there's tons of demand for this sorts of things.
The hard part for you is going to be thinking about what is the niche, what is the goal, how can you actually produce a really good experience, and what is the price point that makes it a no-brainer.
The next category is around liquidity.
I often hear people say, Greg, software is done.
It's over.
Don't even consider thinking about building anything in software.
One example I always give to people is marketplaces.
There's so much still opportunity to build marketplaces.
And what is a marketplace, actually, before I get into it?
A marketplace is just a fancy word for saying a place where there's supply and demand and you're connecting that supply and demand on this website, on this app.
A friend of mine launched a marketplace last week, I think.
It's called finallap.com.
Basically what it is is high-end collectible cars.
Every week you come to the site and you can bid on this high-end collectible cars thing.
They curate the cars and there's a lot of hype around it.
I think he has a big audience on Instagram so he uses his Instagram audience to market it.
It's just an example of a little bit of a new mechanic car sales, collectibles.
So there's that niche there.
And all of a sudden, there's a new marketplace for this sort of thing.
And I think what's really cool about marketplaces is they are one of the most sticky businesses of all time.
If you're able to get people, get the attention and bring that attention into a marketplace, you've got a really good...
good business there.
I mean, in the car space, we all know cars and bids sold for a ton of money, many millions of dollars.
There's so many examples of marketplaces that have gotten acquired for ridiculous amounts and ridiculous sums of money.
Why?
Because again, we all know that it's...
it's so hard to go and create.
Now I think there's an opportunity to go and actually find creators, find media companies and then build their marketplaces for them, partner with them.
Or you end up just incubating the attention yourself and then you go and build the liquidity.
So I think there's a lot of opportunity here, a lot of unmet demand.
The hard part here is about thinking about What is a new mechanic that doesn't exist currently?
What is a new niche or micro niche that just doesn't need to be new actually?
What is an underserved niche or micro niche that is just screaming that they need a marketplace?
I like this one a lot.
Also, what's cool about the marketplace and liquidity space here is you can go and use a GrokBot, a Cloud Code.
one of these personal agent platforms to go and actually run a lot of the tough parts of running a marketplace.
So it's just really cool that in the past running a marketplace was pretty intense from a management perspective.
Support tickets, you have a lot of people and everything needs to be perfect.
with AI now and personal agents, we've gotten to the point where you actually don't really need a big team.
You can create a team of one, two, three, four, five people and it could support a marketplace that does many millions in GMV.
So I like this one a lot.
Unique data.
This has gone viral over the last few months.
You see data brokers making millions of dollars a week.
I'll just give a high level, what is that business?
The business is basically, on one hand, and maybe I'll do a whole breakdown on a separate episode if people are interested.
But basically, on one side, you have unique data around some Initially it was coding.
A lot of these platforms like Mercore and MicroOne and things like that, they were getting data, coding data, and they were selling it to the big models.
Now the big models just are hungry for these new types of data that they don't have access to.
So the game is, what is that data?
And then how can you sell it to them?
That's basically the game.
There's still a tremendous amount of opportunity there.
And that's what I'd call a data-rich business.
Another data-rich business is actually if you have access to some amount of data that isn't easily accessible, you can go and have a curated directory of some sort that people will pay for.
And I think you're going to see a just huge explosion of curated websites and apps over the next few years.
Why do I think that?
In a world where LLMs basically give you infinite content, social feeds basically give you infinite content, you're going to want to go and access curated databases of...
content that you believe is high quality.
I'll give you the example that comes to mind just like off the cuff.
Google reviews or Yelp reviews, just reviews of restaurants in general, have gotten to a place where, I don't know if you've noticed this, it's either like five-star reviews or one-star reviews.
And then it's a three-on-five, right?
Because you've got some fives and ones or a four-on-five.
And it's just very polarizing with reviews.
And also, I think a lot of people have gamed the review sections on places like Yelp and stuff.
So I think that for me, it would be really cool to pop into a website or an app and really give me new restaurant recommendations that were actually high, high, high quality reviews that weren't just like love it or hate it.
Yes, that's an example of a consumer business.
Consumer business have more risks, less likely to work.
But I'm using it as an example to share that there's probably some reviews that are high quality.
And there's probably a way to curate that into a database and someone might be willing to pay something to access that.
I think there's a ton of opportunity in enterprise.
I think there's a ton of opportunity in prosumer.
I think there's a ton of opportunity in the SMB space.
I think that there's some consumer opportunities as well.
But overall, the game here is how do you create, because we're talking about AI-proof startup, startups, what does that look like?
How do you create data that someone else can't get?
And then you either sell it as a website or app to people monthly or whatever, or you sell it to the labs, or you do both.
Lastly, I think you're starting to see this, but it's so early.
Customers paying for results.
I believe that there's going to be more and more automated AI services.
What do I mean by that?
Basically where you have a bunch of agents going and doing the work.
The example I've given in the past on the pod is how do you create a creative agency that is fully automated by different creative models?
So it creates logos on the fly or landing pages on the fly.
The unfair advantage that you can have is around context, is around data, is around the system that you've created.
If you can create the best system for a particular output, then there's some amount of moat or some amount of defense that you can have against that.
Now, if I was ranking these, I wouldn't put the outcomes one as the best one.
It's probably the least.
I think physical stuff, license and regulation stuff, huge.
I don't want to rank them all, but I would say at the bottom would probably be outcomes.
Automated AI services, I just feel like you don't see this very often and there's an opportunity.
The example I gave on the podcast before is how do you look at...
platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, see what people want to pay for, and then create a essentially machine that goes and bids on some of this work.
There's a ton of opportunity there.
And I think agents are going to fulfill a lot of that work.
The way to make it AI proof is if you have the best possible.
And the way you make the best possible agents is if you feed them with the best possible data, the best possible insights, the best possible inspiration, and you have something like we talked about around permission, like you have a deal with a particular company that no one else can have and stuff like that.
This is basically the map of how to think about a world where when AI makes software and content and answers...
pretty much free.
How do you build something with value?
Is it everything in here?
No.
This is just some of the main ones, the main categories to get your creative juices flowing.
I think there's, I'll end with, I think there's a ton of opportunity.
You do have to be creative.
You do have to think about how many, you know.
Do you want to mix some of these?
Do you want some attention stuff with some belonging stuff?
Do you want some permission stuff with some liquidity stuff?
Do you want some outcome stuff with some unique data?
So there is a bit of a mixing.
It's not like you just go into one category and that's it.
But I do believe that I wouldn't look at the world and be like, it's done and we can't create startup ideas and we can't create assets.
In fact, sometimes when there's the most amount of chaos...
creates the most amount of opportunity.
Thank you for listening.
Hope it's been helpful.
If you want more of this stuff in your feed, like, comment, and subscribe.
I'm here to get your creative juices flowing.
Here to help you navigate this crazy world we live in with ideas that could help you build a business.
So thank you for watching the Startup Ideas podcast and I'll see you next time.