Why GenAI Is Built for People, Not Corporations

For over a century, new technology followed a pattern: the first to benefit were those with scale—governments, militaries, and multinational corporations. GenAI broke that pattern.

This time, it's the individual who captures the upside first.
This time, it's you who gets the jet pack.

GenAI flips the value curve

Before GenAI:

With GenAI:

The marginal cost of building something powerful has collapsed—from millions in infra and hiring to just a weekend and an API key.

Individuals get 10× productivity. Corporations get red tape.

Here's the core asymmetry:

A solo builder gets superpowers. A large corporation gets... a procurement process.

Let's compare:

McKinsey's own research confirms it: only 1% of enterprises consider themselves "AI mature"—and the bottleneck isn't employees. It's leadership. Bureaucracy. Brand risk.

In contrast, small teams just build and ship.

The AI stack is now "indie-native"

The old stack:

• SAP
• Salesforce
• Oracle
• Manual workflows
• Custom dashboards

The GenAI-native stack:

• GPT or Mixtral + LangChain or OpenDevin
• Pinecone or Chroma
• Vercel or Railway for infra
• Notion + Airtable + Make for glue logic
• Copilot, Claude, or Replit Ghostwriter for code

This stack isn't just cheaper—it's smarter, more composable, and deploys without teams of consultants.

One-person departments are real now

Here's what a solo builder can replace with GenAI tools:

Result: A one-person startup can do what a 20-person team did just 3 years ago.

Real-world proof: Tiny teams, massive outcomes

• Midjourney: ~$200M revenue, ~100 employees
• Perplexity: 38 employees, 500M+ users, ~$1B valuation
• Lamini, Cognosys, Hexagram: AI-native startups built with <10 people and landing major funding

The investor class is already adapting. Sam Altman predicts one-person unicorns. Andrej Karpathy openly muses about solo dev IPOs. Carta data shows more than a third of new funded startups now have a single founder.

This isn't theory—it's happening.

But why don't corporations benefit more?

They do benefit—but the upside curve is flattened by scale.

Let's break it down:

Why the drop-off?

• Legacy code & tech debt
• Departmental silos
• Compliance + legal
• Internal resistance to change
• Vendor dependencies

In other words, the same scale that gave big firms power now holds them back.

Prediction timeline: The next 3 years

What this means for you

Whether you're a dev, designer, writer, product person, or just curious: you've never had more leverage than right now.

You don't need permission. You need an idea, a weekend, and a bit of grit.

Start small:

• Automate your job
• Build a micro-tool for your niche
• Launch an agent that saves 5 hours a week

The value curve is steep—but only at the start. And right now, the starting line is open to anyone.

Final thought

GenAI isn't enterprise-first. It's imagination-first.
It rewards speed, clarity, and small bets made quickly.
And that's why, for the first time in tech history, the main beneficiaries aren't corporations. They're humans.

Jetpacks are personal.

About the author

Mikhail Liublin writes about the future of work, AI-native creativity, and why the next billion-dollar idea might come from a coffee shop, not a corporate tower. Subscribe to stay ahead of the curve.