TLDR Tech / Fintech
Who gets to eat? Vertical AI and the dispatcher problem
Collapsing “intelligence costs” will grow AI spend but commoditize many vertical AI “service-as-software” wedges, pushing margins toward zero unless startups build defensibility beyond cheap inference. The key risk is the “dispatcher problem”: if your advantage is simply delivering the same service cheaper via LLMs, you're a middleman sitting on a cost curve you don't own (model labs and competitors will undercut you). Durable winners become internal systems embedded in customer operations—capturing data gravity, trust, integrations, and platform lock-in—using low-price wedges to gain distribution, then expanding into a system of intelligence/action that's structurally hard to rip out.
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