AI is coming like a force of nature—ready or not. I assert it’s a part of human evolution, but that’s a topic for another time. To resist the AI momentum is as futile as resisting a wave on the beach. The key is to figure out how to embrace and leverage it to propel ourselves forward. As an individual trying to apply AI, I’ve written multi-user games, social media apps, and just played around to see how I can use AI to win.

Are people who are working at companies whose old-school specialties got eaten by free LLM features out of a job? Nope. The smart companies are thriving by leaning hard into AI themselves:

• Grammarly: Basic grammar and rewriting? Totally free in Grok or other LLMs now. But they hit over $700 million ARR this year, raised a billion in growth cash, and keep growing by building a full AI communication platform with deeper enterprise tools and tone/strategy features LLMs don’t nail as seamlessly. [*]
• Canva: Simple image gen and design prompts? Built into every multimodal model. Yet Canva’s blowing up—$3.3 billion ARR, $42 billion valuation, named a top disruptor—by going all-in on their own Magic Studio AI suite, pro templates, brand kits, and now a full Creative OS that pros and teams pay for. Oh, and they’re getting ready to IPO. [*]
• Adobe: Photoshop-style edits and image creation used to be their locked-in moat; Firefly-like stuff is everywhere for free. Still, record revenue in FY25, Firefly subscriptions doubled quarter-over-quarter, 70+ million monthly AI users—because pros stick with the integrated workflow, precision tools, and commercial-safe models. [*]
• AISense (now Otter.ai): Real-time transcription? Whisper and built-in LLM features crushed the basic version. They’re at $100 million+ ARR anyway, pushing meeting agents that summarize, assign tasks, and integrate across enterprise stacks way beyond raw transcription. [*]

These companies didn’t fight the commoditization—they wrapped better user experiences, reliability, integrations, and domain-specific features around the AI ecosystem and turned it into paid value.

So, no excuses. Embrace the change. Win!