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 primary constraint in professional services is human capital—availability, skills, and location. AI agents, working in hybrid teams with humans, remove this bottleneck. This unconstrains service delivery, potentially expanding the total addressable market by seven to eight times by meeting previously unmet demand.

VEON is developing proprietary Large Language Models (LLMs) like Kaz LLM, tailored to local languages and cultural nuances. This "sovereign AI" strategy creates a competitive advantage that is difficult for global tech giants, who lack deep local context, to penetrate or replicate.

Focusing on AI for cost savings yields incremental gains. The transformative value comes from rethinking entire workflows to drive top-line growth. This is achieved by either delivering a service much faster or by expanding a high-touch service to a vastly larger audience ("do more").

In an era dominated by AI, businesses requiring physical infrastructure and specialized, licensed human intervention (like doctors or pharmacists) are highly defensible. AI can expand the top of the marketing funnel, but the company controlling the real-world delivery and expert services captures the value.

For entrepreneurs building on top of large language models, the key differentiator is not creating general platforms but achieving deep domain specialization. The call to arms is to know a vertical better than anyone and imbue that unique knowledge into AI agents, creating a defensible moat against more generalized tools.

Simply using AI provides no competitive advantage, as it's a widely available tool. A true, defensible moat is created by combining AI's capabilities with your unique domain expertise, proprietary processes, and established relationships. AI should augment your existing strengths, not replace them.

The common analogy of AI being "like a website" that every company must adopt may be misleading. The real transformative power of AI could be in enabling entirely new, AI-native businesses that leapfrog incumbents, rather than simply being a feature tacked onto existing products.

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.