Our Thesis on AI, Business, and What Comes Next
This is what we believe. It's the thing you link to when someone asks "what do you guys actually think?" - a living document we update as things evolve.
Last updated February 2026 · A living document
SaaS Is Dying
The entire SaaS model is built on selling you a tool and making you do the work. Log in. Learn the UI. Build your own workflows. Figure out what the data means. AI flips that. Customers don't want dashboards - they want the outcome the dashboard was supposed to help them get. The winners of the next decade won't sell software. They'll sell results - automated, delivered, done. Software becomes infrastructure, invisible to the end user. The interface disappears. The value stays.
The Small Team Era
A 10-person team with AI agents will consistently outcompete a 100-person team without them. Not by a little. By an order of magnitude. Marketing teams going from 50 to 3 people. Agents handling entire back-office workflows overnight. Decisions in Slack threads that take 100-person orgs weeks of meetings. The coordination overhead of large teams is the tax that AI eliminates. Small teams with agents don't need alignment meetings. They don't need middle management. They need taste, systems, and the willingness to let machines do what machines do best.
Agents Eat the Back Office
Most businesses run on invisible labor - data entry, reconciliation, reporting, scheduling, follow-ups. Entire departments exist to move information from one system to another. AI agents don't get tired. They don't make copy-paste errors. They don't need training on the new CRM. They just run. The back office is the first domino. Within five years, the majority of routine business operations will be agent-handled. The companies that figure this out first won't just save money - they'll operate at a speed their competitors can't match.
The Window Is Open
Right now, in early 2026, we're in a rare window. The technology is powerful enough to build real things but early enough that most industries haven't figured it out yet. This window won't last. In two years, every consulting firm will have an AI practice. Every agency will claim to be AI-native. Every startup will have agents in their pitch deck. The advantage goes to whoever builds the deepest expertise and the strongest systems now - while the rest of the market is still running pilots and publishing thought leadership about "the future of AI."
The Context Layer Is the Moat
AI agents are becoming commodity infrastructure. GPT, Claude, Gemini - pick one, they all work. The agent isn't the hard part anymore. The hard part is the layer between the agent and your data. Domain knowledge. Industry logic. The context that turns a generic chatbot into something that actually knows what it's doing. We call this the Context Layer - domain expertise baked into technology. Anyone can get to 80% with ChatGPT. Getting to 99% takes deep knowledge of your industry wired into every prompt, every data connection, every workflow. That gap is our entire business.
Curiosity Over Hype
Every week there's a new "everything has changed" moment in AI. Most of it is noise. Some of it is signal. The only thing that actually matters is staying curious enough to tell the difference - and adapting fast when it's real. We don't chase hype. We don't follow playbooks. We stay close to the technology, test relentlessly, and change direction the moment the evidence says we should. No attachment to last month's plan. No ego about being wrong. Just a bias toward learning and moving.
This is what we think. It will change. That's the point.
This document is a living thesis - updated as we learn, as the technology shifts, and as our own thinking evolves. If something here is wrong six months from now, that means we're paying attention.
- The Niche Mates team