You run a business that works. Clients pay you, the numbers stack up, and you have added AI in a few places to speed things up. You still have the feeling that something much bigger is available and that other founders are getting to it before you are. That feeling is correct.

I founded a social media agency at 22 and sold it in 2021. My next business was a platform for business coaching and mentoring by voice note. It was running and progressing well. Then, on 3 December 2022, my friend Richard sent me a message about a new chatbot from OpenAI. He said it was like having a genius in your pocket. I cancelled my plans for the week, went straight down a rabbit hole and ended up here .

Your business will not look the same as it did in 2023, and nor should it. Companies that build AI into what they sell are valued 130% higher than the ones only using it to work faster. If yours has not changed, it is a ticking time bomb. People expect different things and the world is moving fast. You have a big opportunity to reimagine what already exists. Here are the exact five steps to follow to transform your business so it thrives over the next decade.

The first principles behind turning your business into an AI business

Summarise the value your business creates

Explain in one sentence the most basic thing people receive from you. Think about a taxi company in first principles. Its job is to get someone from A to B. Uber's current model lets you order a car online, the car arrives with a driver, and it takes you from A to B. In the future, the car will arrive without a driver. After that, perhaps there will be no car at all and we will teleport from A to B.

Define the value you deliver for your customers at its most fundamental level. Why do they hire you or buy your products? Then keep asking why, again and again until you reach the true outcome they desire. Strip away every part you have built on top of your business and you find the one thing your customers are buying.

Imagine how AI could create that value from scratch

Visualise, meditate and look into the future. Imagining something that does not exist requires you to stop looking at the past. Talk to friends who think bigger than you do. Tell them the value you are trying to create and ask how they would design it from scratch. I sent out questions on X, asking things like, “if you could pick any coach in the entire world, who would it be?” and “if you could have any coaching arrangement you wanted, what would it look like?”

The core value my business created was relevant guidance for business owners. So the question became, how can AI deliver that guidance from scratch. The answer was Coachvox 2.0. AI coaches based on the coaches themselves, using their brand, their knowledge and their style to give guidance without the human being needed every time. Clients still get the help they came for. Coaches share their wisdom at scale.

Vibe code your first version this weekend

See the world through your customers' eyes. Take a piece of paper and map out how you would support one of them from the first hello to the result they want, every step where they get stuck and every point where you give them something they value. Nothing technical yet. Just the path they walk and the moments you make a difference.

Then talk it through using Wispr Flow into Claude Cowork. Describe the path out loud, ask for options for how AI could deliver each part of it, and choose the version that would serve your customer better than you can serve them now. Build that platform. The first one you make in a weekend will teach you more than a year of thinking about it.

Build a plan and test demand for almost nothing

Turn the ambitious idea into numbers. Put them on a spreadsheet and work out whether the thing you have imagined could become a commercially viable business, with a price people would pay and a cost you can live with. The maths either works or it sends you back a step with better information.

Once the numbers work on paper, find the simplest way to test real life demand. Our first test was a basic website with a few Typeforms on it. When people completed the forms and registered their interest, we knew the idea had potential. Spending six months in a build with no evidence is how founders lose a year.

Build the thing you would use yourself

The new version of Coachvox was useful to me from day one. An AI version of me generated leads, helped people understand my teaching and kept them on the website for longer. Every one of those outcomes paid for itself before any customer arrived.

Because it was useful to me, it was useful to thousands of other coaches, and the pivot worked. Start with the tool you want to exist in your own business, then look up and count how many people run a business like yours. That number is your market.

The five steps that turn a regular business into an AI business

The next wave of billionaires will be AI billionaires. The word itself gives us a clue, because AI sits right there inside billionAIre. Build tools instead of only using tools. Go back to first principles, work out what people are buying from you, and create what your customers will want in the next decade. Test the demand and start.

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