When I was 13, I had a side hustle building websites for local businesses. This was the 1990s. Building a site meant weeks on a dial-up connection, hand-coding HTML line by line, and breaking layouts because you missed a single character. If I made $2,000 in a summer, it was because I gave up nearly every waking hour to do it. My income was capped by how fast I could work.
Around that same time, my grandfather gave me advice that I still come back to: focus on building something people actually need. He had spent his life running a real business, serving real customers, and he had little patience for trends that didn’t solve a clear problem.
Years later, when I was exploring different product ideas, I ran them by him. Some were flashy. One was even sneakers. He listened politely. Then I told him I was thinking about air filters. He leaned in. Air filters made sense. People need them. They’re not exciting, but they matter. That reaction told me I was onto something.
Today, I run Filterbuy, a $260 million domestic manufacturing company that makes and ships air filters across the country. Looking back, that early experience taught me something most people still miss: effort scales poorly, but leverage compounds.
That’s why I think many leaders are misreading what AI actually represents for the economy.
Most executive conversations about AI focus on risk, regulation, or cost reduction. Those are valid concerns, but they miss the larger shift. AI isn’t primarily about replacing workers or cutting headcount. It’s about changing who gets leverage.
For most of American history, leverage belonged to people who could hire large teams, raise capital, or build software. Everyone else traded time for money. That’s now changing, and the biggest beneficiaries won’t be programmers. They’ll be people running practical, non-tech businesses.
Consider what a small service operator looks like today. A plumber, HVAC technician, or local manufacturer spends a surprising amount of time on work that has nothing to do with their core skill. Scheduling jobs. Sending invoices. Following up with customers. Forecasting demand. Those tasks aren’t hard, but they create friction. Over time, that friction caps growth.
AI doesn’t eliminate the need for skilled labor in those businesses. It removes the drag around it.
A plumber who uses AI to handle dispatching, estimates, customer communication, and follow-ups is no longer limited by paperwork or missed calls. That operator can serve more customers with the same crew, reduce stress, and run a cleaner business. The work itself doesn’t change. The scale does.
That’s why I believe AI matters more to plumbers than programmers.
In tech, AI often improves something that already scales well. In physical businesses, it changes the math entirely. It allows one capable operator to manage complexity that used to require layers of staff or outside vendors. You’re no longer growing by adding people as fast as revenue. You’re growing by removing bottlenecks.
We’ve seen this firsthand at Filterbuy. We didn’t use technology to replace people on the factory floor. We used it to clean up scheduling issues, improve forecasting, reduce errors, and speed up decision-making. The value didn’t come from automation alone. It came from giving our team better tools and fewer obstacles.
That’s where I think many AI discussions go wrong. They focus on novelty instead of deployment. On vision decks instead of daily operations. In non-tech industries, the opportunity isn’t to build something flashy. It’s to quietly remove the friction that holds good businesses back.
This has implications for the C-suite.
The wrong question is, “How do we use AI to cut costs?”
The better question is, “How do we use AI to make our people more effective?”
If you have 100 employees, the goal shouldn’t be to get to 80. It should be to allow those 100 people to operate at a higher level. That’s where durable value is created. Companies that do this well won’t look radically different from the outside. They’ll just execute better than everyone else.
We’re entering a phase where AI stops being a topic and starts being infrastructure. It won’t sit in a separate strategy deck. It will show up in how work actually gets done. Scheduling will be tighter. Decisions will be faster. Fewer things will fall through the cracks.
I’ve spent my career leaning into physical goods and so-called boring businesses because that’s where real economic value is built. AI is the first tool I’ve seen that meaningfully shifts leverage toward people who operate in that world.
The internet gave us access to information. AI is giving us access to operational leverage. For leaders willing to apply it where work actually happens, not where it looks impressive, the upside is real. The companies that win won’t be the loudest about AI. They’ll be the ones quietly using it to run better businesses.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
