Most founders I meet are still asking the wrong AI question.

They ask,

“How do we use AI?”

The better question today is,

“What exactly is becoming undefendable?”

I watched the recent Davos conversation between Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind with that lens. Not as a technologist. As a founder who has seen waves come and go.

The signal was clear. Coding is no longer the bottleneck. Thinking still is.

When the CEO of a frontier AI company says his engineers no longer write code, only review it, founders should pause. This is not a future scenario. This is a current operating model.

For Indian services and SaaS companies, this reveals uncomfortable truths.

First, speed is no longer a moat.

If your advantage is faster delivery, cheaper teams, or more engineers, assume that edge is already leaking. AI compresses time brutally. What differentiated you last year will be table stakes next year.

Second, effort-based business models are breaking silently.

Services companies are the first to feel it. Clients will not pay for hours (T&M) once outcomes are predictable. Billing models may lag reality, but not for long.

This is not a sudden shift, nor are IT majors unaware of it.

Tech Mahindra has publicly acknowledged that client conversations are moving from input-based billing to outcome-based models, where value is measured in tangible business impact.

TCS has echoed the same reality, noting that many clients start projects on T&M and then transition to fixed-price or outcome-linked models once value becomes visible.

Third, junior-heavy pyramids will strain.

Entry-level roles will not disappear overnight. But hiring will slow. We are already seeing this in the recent quarterly results of Indian IT majors. Expectations from clients will rise. A fresher with AI fluency will outperform a five-year engineer who resists change.

I see founders making one critical mistake. They are waiting for clarity.

Clarity will not come. Capability will.

The winners in the next 24 months will not be the ones with the best AI strategy decks. They will be the ones who redesign how work actually gets done and delivered.

For services companies, the shift is painful but necessary. You must stop selling people. Start selling outcomes. Build internal platforms. Even if clients never see them. Treat AI as infrastructure, not tooling.

For SaaS founders, the discomfort is different. Features will get copied faster than ever. Defensibility will move away from clever engineering. It will sit in deep customer context, data gravity, and the cost for customers to switch providers.

This is also why large SaaS vendors like Microsoft, Google, HubSpot, and Zendesk have been able to raise prices and introduce more complex pricing tiers over the last year. Not because switching is easy, but because it is not. Customers complain, but they stay. That is what real switching costs look like.

The AI in your product does not defend it.

Dependency does. AI only accelerates that dependency.

The real work, then, is not adding AI features. It is figuring out how the AI in your product becomes part of the customer’s daily decision-making. How it embeds itself into workflows, defaults, and judgement. How you go deeper without turning yourself into a services company.

The question every SaaS founder should eventually reach is not “How do we use AI?”

It is “How does the AI in our product make it harder for customers to leave us?”

This is where founder behaviour matters.

1. If you are not personally using AI daily, you are already late.

1. If your team uses AI but your processes assume old timelines, you are self-sabotaging.

1. If your roadmap assumes stable pricing models, roles and skills, it is fiction.

I am not pessimistic. I am practical.

Every technology wave flattens something. This one flattens execution advantage. What remains is judgment, trust, and responsibility.

Founders who accept this early will redesign calmly. Founders who deny it will call it disruption later.

As Spock says to Bele in Star Trek The Original Series,

‘Change is the essential process of all existence.’

Reflection:

AI will not kill businesses. Delay will. The next two years are not about prediction. They are about honest redesign.

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