AI could end up eliminating many jobs, but it could also lead to a simultaneous boom in entrepreneurship.
Sherwin Wu, Head of Engineering for the OpenAI API, recently shared a striking vision of how artificial intelligence might reshape the business landscape. While much of the tech industry focuses on the possibility of one-person billion-dollar startups, Wu argues that the more profound impact will be a massive proliferation of small and medium-sized businesses enabled by AI tools that make software development accessible to anyone.
“If it’s easy for a person to create a one-person billion-dollar startup, it also means it’s way easier for people to just create startups in general,” Wu explained. “I actually think one second-order effect of this is there’s going to be a huge startup boom and small SMB-style boom, where anyone can build software for anything.”
Wu pointed to early signs already visible in the AI startup ecosystem. “You’re starting to see this play out in the AI startup scene where software has become a lot more vertical-oriented, where creating some AI tool for some vertical tends to work quite well because you really lean into that particular domain and really understand the use case for it.”
He believes this trend will accelerate dramatically. “If you play out AI, there’s no reason why you can’t have a hundred times more of these startups. I think one world that we might end up seeing happen is, in order to enable a one-person billion-dollar startup, there might be a hundred other small startups building bespoke software that works extremely well to support other types of small one-person billion-dollar startups.”
This proliferation of AI-enabled businesses could transform the software industry itself. “I think we might actually enter into a golden age of B2B SaaS and just software and service in general,” Wu said. “As it gets easier and easier to build software, as it’s easier and easier to run a company, you might actually just end up seeing way more of these startups.”
Wu offered a more grounded perspective on what success might look like for most entrepreneurs. “Yeah, there might be one-person billion-dollar startups, but there might be a hundred million-dollar startups. There might be tens of thousands of $10 million startups. And as an individual, it’s actually pretty great to have a $10 million business—that’s enough for your stuff for life at that point. We might really see an explosion in that way.”
Wu’s prediction aligns with broader trends already emerging in the technology sector. The rapid adoption of AI coding assistants and no-code platforms has already lowered barriers to software development. Vertical AI startups have attracted significant venture capital investment in recent months, targeting specific industries from legal services to healthcare to manufacturing. Meanwhile, tools like OpenAI’s own Codex, along with competitors from Anthropic and Google, have made sophisticated AI capabilities accessible to developers without requiring extensive machine learning expertise. If Wu’s vision materializes, we may be witnessing not just the transformation of how software is built, but a fundamental democratization of entrepreneurship itself—where the ability to identify a problem becomes nearly as valuable as the ability to code a solution.