An Open Letter to the AI Industry

You say AI is for everyone. Here is why that is still not true, and what it would take to change it.

Joshua Drew · Founder, TTMLabs · March 2026 · Perth, Western Australia

I'm not writing this from a boardroom.

I'm writing this from Perth, Western Australia, a city most of the AI industry couldn't point to on a map. Before I built TTMLabs, I was working in the Pilbara. If you don't know the Pilbara, it's one of the most remote regions on earth. Red dirt. Extreme heat. The kind of place where the concept of Silicon Valley feels like science fiction.

I built the first version of TTMLabs from my phone. Sat in a Landcruiser. In the middle of nowhere.

I'm telling you this not because I want a pat on the back. I'm telling you this because it's proof of something the AI industry keeps saying but rarely demonstrates: this technology can reach anyone.

Let's Be Honest About What's Actually Happening

AI is not coming. AI is here. And it is already displacing people.

Not in some distant future. Not in a theoretical scenario your ethics team workshopped last quarter. Right now, today, people are losing work because of this technology. Roles that existed five years ago are gone. Companies that used to employ ten people to handle customer communications now employ two. Entire categories of white collar work are being automated at a pace that no workforce training programme, no government policy, and no corporate responsibility statement is keeping up with.

I'm not saying that to be alarmist. I'm saying it because pretending otherwise is dishonest, and the AI industry has been dishonest about this for long enough.

The standard response from every major lab, every keynote speaker, every thought leader on this topic is some version of the same thing: don't worry, new jobs will be created, productivity will rise, it will all work out. A new utopia is just around the corner. Trust us.

I don't buy it. And more importantly, the people actually living through this disruption don't buy it either.

The receptionist who was told her role was being restructured. The paralegal whose entire department was replaced by a contract with an AI provider. The graphic designer watching their freelance work disappear because clients can generate in seconds what used to take hours. These are not abstract statistics. These are real people with mortgages and families and no obvious path forward.

Telling them a utopia is coming is not a plan. It's a deflection.

What the Industry Owes People

Here is what I believe: the AI industry has a responsibility that goes beyond building impressive technology and writing blog posts about responsible AI.

We owe people a transition that is slow enough to be survivable.

That means being honest in public about displacement, not just in internal risk assessments. It means supporting accessible tools that help displaced workers stay relevant, not just enterprise contracts that replace them. It means pushing for considered, staged integration of AI into industries and workplaces rather than racing to capture market share before anyone has time to adapt.

Speed is not a virtue when the people paying the price for it have no safety net.

I'm not anti AI. I've dedicated everything I have to building with it. But I believe the pace of deployment, without honest public conversation about its consequences, is reckless. And the utopia is coming, trust the process narrative being pushed by the biggest players in this space is doing real harm to real people who deserve better than platitudes.

The Problem I Have With Your Message

Every major AI company on earth says some version of the same thing: AI is for everyone. AI will democratise access. AI will level the playing field.

And then they build products that are unaffordable for most, require dedicated technical teams to implement, and are marketed exclusively to enterprise customers and VC-backed startups.