AI Eats the Operating System

Every day I'm more shocked at how much of the world AI is going to eat. It's becoming the operating system for nearly everything we do, and at this point I don't think that's even up for debate.

We aren't just reinventing the internet. We're reinventing the computer. The model is the computer now. Everything runs through it, and everything else becomes an app or a service the model calls.

The labs absorb what has no moat

If the model is the computer, the big labs are the platform, and platforms absorb whatever sits on top of them without a real moat. We're watching it happen to software in real time. Products that can be rebuilt by a model in an afternoon are getting repriced, and the market is doing that math faster than the companies are.

What survives is anything the model can't simply replicate: a physical footprint, logistics, regulated sign off, proprietary data, human trust. When I look for opportunity right now, I look for the places AI hasn't crept into yet and ask which of those moats they have.

You'll switch stores for your bot

The other day I needed spark plugs. I didn't open a website. I told an agent what I needed and it ordered them.

For anything that's a commodity, I don't care where it comes from. If two tubes of toothpaste do the same thing and one is 50 cents cheaper, I want the cheaper one, delivered fastest. An agent is better at finding that than I am, and it isn't swayed by whatever the storefront puts at the top of the page.

So would I switch stores for my bot? Absolutely. I think most people will without even noticing.

That changes who the customer is. One founder put it well: he wasn't going to be selling to people, he was going to be selling to agents. An agent doesn't care what your homepage looks like. It cares whether it can buy what it needs and whether it arrives on time. For a big part of retail, that turns brand into price and logistics, and the retailers that block agents instead of serving them are fighting the tide.

Experts become the sign off

Professional services are next. The labs are paying enormous sums for data from law firms, accounting firms and tax shops for a reason.

I don't think agents fully replace the expert. I think the expert becomes the escalation. You'll hand an agent everything, it'll do the work, and when it hits real uncertainty it'll tell you which three things need a human to review and what that review will cost. The work moves to the model. The judgment, and the accountability for it, stays with a person.

Markets are next

This is the part I spend my days on. If agents are going to shop for us, they're going to invest and trade for us too, and markets as they're built today aren't ready for that.

An agent can't open a brokerage account, sit on hold with support or wait for markets to open on Monday. It needs data it can read and trust, interfaces that behave the same way every time, the ability to pay for exactly what it uses, and settlement that works around the clock. That's a big part of why I believe finance is moving onto open rails. Stablecoins and tokenized assets are things software can actually hold and move.

That's the infrastructure we're building at Lute Labs: market data and trading infrastructure built for people, and increasingly for agents.

The question for every business now, mine included, is simple. Are you an app the model calls, or an app the model replaces?