Will Everyone Become an Entrepreneur Soon?

I think we will all be entrepreneurs soon. With AI, an employee can get far more done than before, and the company keeps all of it. If you want that gain for yourself, you have to work for yourself. And the people who don't choose that will be pushed into it, because their company won't need them anymore.

Say you are one of 50 developers at an insurance company. Your days go into tickets, like a new field in the claims form or a bug in the PDF export. Now you have Claude Code or Codex, and you are 10, 20 or even 100 times as productive. You close tickets like never before and build the features nobody had time for. The company gets a ton of value out of it.

For you, nothing changes. You get the same salary, and the job gets even more stressful. Nobody rewards you for all that output, and nobody even says thanks. It's more the other way around. Your manager gets used to the new speed and expects more next month. All the gains from AI go to the company.

If each developer does ten times as much, the company only needs five of the 50. So the pressure goes up again. You may have to work even more to stay ahead of the others, because the slower 45 will probably be let go. That's sad, but it's not what I want to write about today.

I'm looking at this as a developer. I think the same is true for a lot of office jobs, and maybe even for some blue-collar jobs.

So the next thing you think about is working for yourself. You could build a claims tool for small insurance brokers, who pay you each month. The hours AI saves you are yours, and so is the money from the extra brokers you can now handle.

It's obviously not that simple. Building the tool is the easy part now, and finding brokers who pay for it is hard. I wrote about that in Anyone Can Build an App Now, but Who Is Going to Pay for It? Still, it's probably the only way out of the rat race, although I don't really know.

People are already trying it. In July, The New York Times reported that the App Store got about 560,000 new apps in the first half of 2026. That's almost as many as in all of 2025. One of the people in the article is Marco Pérez, a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase who planned to quit to make apps full-time. His scrapbooking app made about $3,000 in profit.

Not all of these people will make a living from it. But the more you can get done with AI, the less sense it makes to hand all of it to an employer for a fixed salary.

Poorer countries already look like this. In low-income countries, almost 80% of the people who work are self-employed, according to ILO estimates published by the World Bank. Many of them farm their own land or run a market stall, because there aren't enough jobs. In high-income countries it's about 11%, and in Germany about 8%.

If big companies let go of 90% of their staff, rich countries will have the same problem. That's the dark side of the same story. The people who lose their jobs will become entrepreneurs too, even if they never wanted to.

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