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· Technology · 6 min read

The Big One

Why AI is creating the largest commercial opportunities in history

  • ai
  • automation
  • security
Proziam

For most of human history, change has been incremental. It takes years, often centuries, for an innovation to come along that changes everything. We are in the very early stages of a change of that magnitude.

As much as I enjoy hyperbole, this isn’t that. Whether you are terrified of what thinking machines will do to your profession or bullish about advances in medical research, there is no doubt this is going to be the big one.

Like all major changes, it will bring both good and bad. Both sides of the coin represent one of the largest opportunities in the history of commerce.

Archimedes’ Lever

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

~ Archimedes

Archimedes probably never envisioned a student muttering under their breath, willing a piece of intelligent rock to do their homework. But beyond lazy students, every management, office, or otherwise computer-based job will fundamentally change. But change doesn’t always come easily.

Today, a motivated user can get a sizable productivity gain if they take charge of their tools and invest the time to learn how to set up a harness, build skills, and prompt effectively. Unfortunately, the majority of the workforce treats their tools the same way a sales team treats their CRM. Rare is the sales guy who doesn’t leave a wake of half-useless garbage.

In the end, nobody really wants to be managing a team of AI interns. It is faster, but much of the productivity gain comes from constantly getting blasted with waves of output to review and approve, or questions you need to answer. For anyone who enjoys deep, focused work, this is a never-before-seen layer of hell.

Knowing this, companies try to avoid agentic interns in favor of repeatable workflows. Unfortunately, N8n and Make are far too complicated for the average non-tech professional to build workflows on their own. This means companies have to hire engineers and team them up with non-tech professionals to build a single simple automation.

Dozens of workflows could save a few minutes every day, but the cost is too high to justify developing them.

In aggregate, the complexity of n8n and Make leaves billions of dollars per year on the table.

A product with the capabilities of n8n or Make, but designed to be usable by even a dinosaur in the accounting department, would generate trillions of dollars per year in new productivity.

Svalinn

“Svalinn is a legendary shield in Nordic mythology which stands in front of the Sun, protecting the world from her heat. It has been suggested to be part of a continuous tradition of solar imagery dating back to the Nordic Bronze Age.”

~ Wikipedia

While AI has become the sun around which our world rotates, its rays scorch everything they touch. Finding vulnerabilities is no longer the exclusive domain of skilled hackers. Exploiting those vulnerabilities no longer even requires you to be aware of them. Now a fleet of agents can do both.

2026 has been a big year for software vulnerabilities. The National Vulnerability Database (NVD) lists 86,533 CVE records published between 1 January and 25 October 2026, excluding rejected records. All of 2025 had 48,151.

Ultimately, the stronger offensive abilities become, the more damage bad actors will do with them. This month alone, there were multiple major events in software security.

  1. CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619. These vulnerabilities, known as “php2shell,” allow for unauthenticated remote code execution in PHP. The vulnerabilities affect all PHP installations serving web requests!
  2. Hackers stole roughly $6.3 billion from Binance hot wallets in a record-setting crypto heist. That same day, an entirely different breach happened at Polymarket.
  3. Microsoft Threat Intelligence revealed that a China-state-aligned hacking group called Storm-0940 had used an AI-powered penetration testing framework called ARTEX.
  4. A newly discovered flaw in UEFI firmware allows attackers to execute code during the boot process.

To reiterate, that was just October 2026. In a normal year before 2026, you wouldn’t expect to see this much activity. This is the new normal, and it will remain so until the entire world makes security a serious priority.

This will require adopting entirely new tools, techniques, and hardware at every level, from consumer electronics to enterprise. Without this, we will see the enormous productivity gains offset by equally enormous damage. If governments, militaries, financial institutions, and utilities can’t defend themselves, the resulting chaos will be devastating.

What’s Next

My upcoming chapter(s) will be spent on one of these two problems. I sincerely believe they are the most important things to be working on for the foreseeable future. Plus, it would be hard to stay on the sidelines if you know that whichever company becomes the market leader solving either problem will be worth trillions of dollars.

If you are building in these spaces, want to collaborate, or want to understand where the world is heading, let's talk.

References & Downloads

Saved copies are hosted here for offline reading if the originals move or disappear. Web pages are preserved as text-only HTML, including their text, links, and tables; CVE records are preserved as official JSON. The capture details record original URLs and capture dates. Download capture details (JSON).

  1. Wikipedia — Svalinn, the source of the quotation. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  2. Wikipedia — Nordic mythology. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  3. Wikipedia — Sól. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  4. Wikipedia — Nordic Bronze Age. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  5. Brandefense — CVE Statistics 2026. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  6. CVE-2026-109618. Original · Download CVE record (JSON)
  7. CVE-2026-109619. Original · Download CVE record (JSON)
  8. Fox News — AI is now powering cyberattacks, Microsoft warns. Background coverage linked in the original PDF. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  9. Microsoft — AI-driven, large-scale nation-state campaign using ARTEX enables supply chain compromise. The October 21 report on Storm-0940 and ARTEX. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
  10. Ars Technica — Code-execution flaw in UEFI firmware affects most servers on planet Earth. Original · Download saved copy (HTML)
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