Last Monday night, a friend stumped me

Lao Zhou, who runs a coffee shop, put down his chopsticks and asked: "AI is everywhere — should my little shop get a robot too?"

I froze. Because I'd been stuck on this exact question myself — last year I was scrolling AI news every day, getting more and more anxious, feeling like if I didn't get on the train I'd get left behind. But where's the train going? I had no clue.

Anthropic dropped a number last week: $30 trillion

Anthropic is the company behind Claude. CEO Dario Amodei said AI could add $30 trillion to global GDP. The entire US economy is only $27 trillion a year.

At first I figured this was investor bait — nothing to do with me. But Lao Chen, who runs a 3-person Xiaohongshu (Little Red Book) agency in Shenzhen, told me last week: "It's not that AI is amazing — it's that big companies are grabbing turf."

After chewing on it for a week, I landed on two layers:

  • Resource layer: giants are hoarding compute and grabbing big clients — we can't compete there
  • Opportunity layer: giants won't bother with "write a menu for a café" or "reply to customers for a nail salon" — that's the messy, unglamorous work, and it's exactly ours

How long it'll take you to think this through today

  • Money: $0
  • Time: 30 minutes (read The Neuron's original piece)
  • Technical barrier: zero — you don't need to know any tech
  • First step: go to anthropic.com, click "Customers" in the nav, skim 3 real case studies

I made this exact mistake before: scrolling news every day but never once asking myself "which case can I port to my own business." It wasn't until last year, when a nail salon girl asked me "can you set up AI auto-replies for me?" that it clicked for me — that's the entry point for us small business folks.

How to read the $30 trillion at each stage

Just starting out / side hustler: this doesn't concern you. The $30 trillion is a story for Wall Street. Your job tonight is to make an extra $100.

Got 1-2 clients: spend 1 hour browsing 3 customer case studies each on Anthropic's and OpenAI's sites. Pick the one that most resembles your client, and ask yourself "what could I do for them?" That's your next product.

Scaling (5-20 people): start thinking about it seriously. Giants grab big clients, but every big client has a swarm of small vendors around them. Can you become "the AI-savvy small vendor"? That's a whole new moat.