This is not a history lesson, but context is king in the pursuit of understanding. History, is our only means of intuiting the future. Quantum mechanics, relativistic physics and now transformers, are our means of prediction.

So with every major advancement in technological infrastructure, it make sense to look back in an effort to place ourselves in time. What kind of time are we living in? Is this the next industrial revolution?

It’s hard for me to care, really. The size of the advancement has little impact on my life. I am not a titan in pursuit of power. I find value in feeling useful, not in control. So through the looking glass, I try to assess how I can be useful in our time, whatever kind it may be.

How to look at history

In respect to economic opportunity, let’s analyze history through the lens of trade. Humanity went through a major transition in the 1800s. Colonialism was in full swing, and agricultural societies were forced into the trades. From then on, any economic participant not farming or building, was trading. Now people are either trading knowledge, or goods, for capital. Their value is justified by the work required to obtain the knowledge or product and the supply/demand for said information or good. Don’t believe me? It’s right here.

Technological advancements are typically found in production. Faster, cheaper ways of making things have a huge impact on supply chain. But major shifts happen when there are technological advancements in trade.

The last major shift in trade happened in the 1990s, when the internet became accessible to anyone with a phone line. Traders could suddenly teleport into everyone’s living room, all at once, to sell their products.

I like to compare it to the introduction of railways. Every few miles of new track opened new opportunities for trade. If you owned the trade routes, you owned the world.

So are we in a trade revolution?

When compared to history, it doesn’t seem like it. Trade revolutions are a result of technology changing our relationship to space and time. They change how products are delivered. I think advancements in AI are advancements in information extraction. Tools for information mining and presentation. Granted, the advancement is huge. Probably comparable to graduating from bovine to engine powered plows.

The people with the capital and knowledge capable of distributing engines at that time, did really well. And even today, there are very few of them capable of doing it at scale, for a profit.

The only difference here is that these AI models are information engines.

The services supply boom

What information engines can’t provide is experience and context. And unlike cars, every person has the innate ability to wrap an information engine in their own context. And lets assume each individual has slightly different context and perspective on the world.

More individuals capable of using vast amounts of information to build more sophisticated tools for hyper local or specific problems, means more individuals running their own business.

In short, I think we’ll see a small business boom.

How can I be useful

I can help people design better businesses. Most business owners don’t start their business to operate it. They have an idea, and they want to build and sell that idea.

As any small business owner knows, running a business takes a whole lot more than that if you expect to turn a profit

As a result, people with great ideas get bogged down in:

1. Managing people

2. Managing finances

3. Optimizing for taxes

4. Managing deal flow

They often don’t even know how to:

1. Forecast their business model

2. Gauge their own performance

3. Organize their operation

Business owners have all of the information they need now. They just don’t have the experience to apply it to their specific context.

Smart people will hire others to support them in areas of execution they’re less capable of improving. When these people are hired, they often come with their own methodologies, tools, and ideas that might make the business more successful, but creates two new problems:

1. A more complicated operation

2. More distance between the operation and the business owner

We built a tool for this

BreadOS serves as an omni-present companion for business owners.

A small business owner, you can use it as a one-stop-shop for their operation. They don’t need to mash together an over-complicated CRM, with a project management system, and accounting software. They don’t need to live in spreadsheet hell for modeling and forecasting. And they get a real-time sense for how their business performs compared to others like it. It’s all in BreadOS.

For founders and operating within a larger team, BreadOS can sit in the background. It’s a completely customizable view into the health of a business, focused on the things they care about. It integrates with all of the tools their team uses in their day-to-day. Tools that might change with personnel. But for them, it’s their business, their way. And always BreadOS.