Your AI Product Is Not A Real Business

I just got back from STEP 2026 in Dubai. Whilst there were some genuinely amazing businesses there, I also saw a lot of companies that won’t make their first year. Most startups now splash AI on to all their marketing. AI is not your product. AI itself does not deliver business value. Unless you are a frontier lab, AI is nothing more than a tool in your stack. Nobody is there shouting ‘MongoDB-enabled trading platform’. Users don’t care if it’s AI. Investors don’t care if it’s AI. They care about what it does, what problem it solves and whether there’s space for it in the market. And if you want to sell to real businesses? I've sat across the table from $5bn consultancies evaluating AI tools. They ask about your architecture, your data residency, how to deploy it on-prem and what you actually own. If the answer is 'we call the OpenAI API' – the meeting is over. Wrappers… Everywhere There are tens of thousands of AI startups right now whose core premise is: Vague idea about product Put