Before replacing human workers, AI expands the total addressable market by making services economically viable for previously unserved segments. For instance, Intercom customers now offer AI support to their free users, something they could never afford with human agents.

The biggest opportunity for AI isn't just automating existing human work, but tackling the vast number of valuable tasks that were never done because they were economically inviable. AI and agents thrive on low-cost, high-consistency tasks that were too tedious or expensive for humans, creating entirely new value.

AI's job-creation potential stems from its ability to unlock demand in six ways: price, access, complexity, continuity, personalization, and relational value. This moves beyond the simple narrative of cost reduction, providing a framework for identifying new markets and services that AI will make viable.

Counterintuitively, making a task cheaper and easier with AI doesn't just eliminate jobs; it drastically increases the overall demand for that task. Just as Excel created more accountants, AI's efficiencies will lead to an explosion in the volume of work, creating new roles and opportunities.

Productivity gains from AI don't simply reduce the total amount of work. Instead, they unlock new capabilities and analytical depths, creating new types of jobs and expanding what's possible. The long tail of work doesn't get shorter; it gets longer in a different, more complex way, representing a growing pie of innovation.

Just as YouTube created more jobs than television lost, AI will lower the cost of software creation so dramatically that millions of new, highly specialized SaaS businesses will emerge. These new companies can be viable with as few as 500 customers.

The narrative of AI destroying jobs misses a key point: AI allows companies to 'hire software for a dollar' for tasks that were never economical to assign to humans. This will unlock new services and expand the economy, creating demand in areas that previously didn't exist.

AI is drastically reducing software development costs. This makes it economically viable for small teams to build highly-focused applications for niche markets, such as specific skilled trades, that were previously too small to attract venture capital-backed software companies.

Beyond making current services cheaper (the "Affordability Unlock"), AI enables a "Possibility Unlock" by making new service models operationally feasible at scale. This creates net-new demand for services, like continuous preventative healthcare, that couldn't exist before, fostering entirely new markets and job ecosystems.