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.
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.
That perspective matters. Because while the AI industry talks about democratization and accessibility and changing the world, the actual products being shipped are built for a very specific kind of customer. Someone technical. Someone with time. Someone who can tolerate complexity and figure things out themselves.
The Honesty Problem
Most AI products are sold on promise and delivered on capability gap. The marketing shows magic. The product requires configuration, prompting expertise, tolerance for failure, and technical patience. The business owner in Perth or Townsville or Darwin doesn't have time to become a prompt engineer. They have a business to run.
The industry has an honesty problem. We oversell what AI can do today. We undersell what it takes to make it work. And the gap between marketing and reality is filled with frustrated customers who tried AI, found it wanting, and walked away convinced it was hype.
The Real Barrier
The barrier isn't technology. The technology exists. The barrier is the gap between what AI can do and what a normal business owner can implement.
Someone needs to stand in that gap. Someone needs to do the configuration, handle the integration, manage the edge cases, and deliver a working solution that the customer can actually use. That's not a prompt. That's a service.
What It Would Take
If the AI industry actually wanted AI to be for everyone, it would stop selling tools and start selling outcomes. It would stop expecting customers to figure things out and start delivering solutions that work out of the box. It would acknowledge that prompt engineering is not a skill normal people should need to learn.
The companies that figure this out will win. Not by having better AI, but by doing the work that turns AI into something useful for the 99% of businesses that don't have technical teams.
That's what we're building at TTMLabs. Not a better tool. A service that makes AI actually work for real businesses.