Ben Thompson Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter analyzing the business strategy behind tech and media companies, and has built a reputation for framing how platfo...

“How do you improve the top line? Multiplying humans, right? There's this difference between multiplying versus replacing. And when you're multiplying humans, you're basically creating entirely new things to do, new workflows, new opportunities. The challenge for this whole trade in general is that usually number one takes longer. And number two, usually comes from new companies that they come in, they disrupt the incumbents by virtue of the AI first company taking on the old school SaaS company. The SaaS company is trying to shove AI and use it as much as they can, but they're just fundamentally not constructed properly to do it. And so, in the fullness of time, those companies go away. The AI native companies take their place, and that's how AI takes over the world. I think there's a very decent chance that that's how it happens. The problem is it takes a long time. And timing is the issue.”

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · October 2026

Context

Thompson is talking about how companies use AI. In the lines just before, he says improving the bottom line means replacing humans, and the same turn then turns to the top line, where AI multiplies what people can do. He argues that this second kind of gain usually takes longer and comes from new AI-native companies, which makes the timing of the AI spending a problem.

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Transcript

Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson Around 43:36 into the episode

Ben Thompson

…reason they're worried about Anthropic is like, we're the right relationship. We're the wrong relationship. That's right. But is what they see with companies is companies who are focused on using AI to improve the bottom line struggle. Because how do you improve the bottom line? Replacing humans.

Andrew Sharp

Yeah.

Ben Thompson

How do you improve the top line? Multiplying humans, right? There's this difference between multiplying versus replacing. And when you're multiplying humans, you're basically creating entirely new things to do, new workflows, new opportunities. The challenge for this whole trade in general is that usually number one takes longer. And number two, usually comes from new companies that they come in, they disrupt the incumbents by virtue of the AI first company taking on the old school SaaS company. The SaaS company is trying to shove AI and use it as much as they can, but they're just fundamentally not constructed properly to do it. And so, in the fullness of time, those companies go away. The AI native companies take their place, and that's how AI takes over the world. I think there's a very decent chance that that's how it happens. The problem is it takes a long time. And timing is the issue. All the money that's being spent on CapEx is being spent now. And that money needs to circle back into because when you go from paying for free cash flows, paying with debt, paying with equity, the idea is it circles back around to your cash flows. Right. Right. And so the question is, how long is that going to take? It's all about timing. I 100% believe in AI. Like, I think that is pretty…

Andrew Sharp

how to monetize it, the new businesses that it enables, the

Ben Thompson

interface of it, the business model around it. Also, while we're here, if this whole interview, them open AI is evil because they include advertising.

Andrew Sharp

Okay.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

“About 50% of their revenue is coming from the big three via those services. So it's coming through AWS, coming through Azure, coming through Google. And it is confirmed that they're doing kind of sketchy accounting, depends how you want to define it, which is if you pay Amazon $100, that … Anthropic is recording that $100 as revenue. Anthropic revenue. And then in reality, like 30, a third of that or so depends, it sort of varies. I think people were saying about 37% goes to the provider, the platform provider, the AWS, the Azure, the Google.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson

“I think it's inevitable that we are right now, will be whatever, sort of in a bubble, and it's going to pop and it's going to be painful. And then we'll come back. That's just the inevitable nature of these things. I think there is an extent to which AI is different in lots of areas. The sort of mechanics of stuff piling in too quickly, there being a mismatch in timing between when it's absorbed or not. Like there's lots of differences that we've talked about between the dot-com era and this era. But that dynamic, I think, where dot-com had lots of good ideas, just didn't make sense for a while or didn't sort of get penetration for a while. I think that is almost inevitably going to be the case.” — Ben Thompson, Sharp Tech with Ben Thompson