Grok Bot Made Me Pivot My Business

Grok Bot made me pivot my business.

A few months ago I started my own consulting practice alongside my day job, helping small businesses drive growth and use AI effectively within their organization. One of the services I offered was focused on building custom solutions using a multitude of tools.

I sold this service to large enterprises like Altitude Sports, helping them save tens of thousands of dollars per year and move 2x faster. And I sold this service to small brands getting off the ground, helping the one-person marketing team deliver like a team of 5.

Building these solutions required deep domain expertise and client knowledge, understanding their tech stack, workflows and team dynamics. It also required a lot of time and resources, and came with a lot of risk when it came to infrastructure, security, and all these things.

Grok Bot launched 2 weeks ago

It completely disrupted this market for a few reasons:

1. Anyone can use it. It’s as simple as using iMessage and building a team of AI agents.

2. It has access to its own virtual computer, running in the cloud 24/7.

3. It can learn from your workflows and reproduce them extremely well, essentially handling your tasks end to end.

4. You can have agents interact and collaborate with each other, which is wild.

And it’s disrupting the market because it brings this technology to the mass market.

Most of the capability already existed somewhere. What changed is that it stopped requiring someone like me to put it together.

So I had to adapt

The value I bring today is in deciding what is worth building, and what’s the best way to set it up.

That’s a bigger job than it sounds like. When building something took weeks, the decision about what to build mostly made itself, because you only got one or two shots a year and the cost narrowed it down for you. Now a team can build twelve things in a quarter, and a lot of those will be a waste of everyone’s time.

I’ve written about this before, from a much safer position. In The Rise of the “Build First” Mindset, I argued that vibe coding was quietly dismantling mid-market SaaS, because the software you used to buy is software you can now assemble yourself.

The same thing applies here. The service I was selling was expensive because the work was hard, and the work stopped being hard.

The half nobody wants

Most of the mandates and requests I get today are for corporate, custom-made AI trainings. It’s fully personalized to the team’s workflows and AI knowledge, and it can transform how a team operates. I’ve seen this happen many, many times.

There’s a reason that work is still there. In The Two Halves of Enablement I wrote that AI enablement is really two jobs. There’s innovation, where you build and test and prototype, and there’s change management, where you get the organization to actually adopt what you built. Most of us only want to do the first one.

Grok Bot took care of the first one and left the second one completely untouched. Giving a team access to agents and getting that team to restructure its week around them are two very different projects, and the second one is still slow and still human.

What this means for the rest of us

If you sell expertise of any kind, take the hardest part of what you do and assume it gets easy within a year. If most of your value disappears under that assumption, you’ve found the thing to start moving away from while you still get to pick the timing.

The same thing applies to teams. If your value is that you know how to build the thing, that’s the part being commoditized right now. The part that isn’t is knowing which thing is worth building, and getting people to actually use it once it exists.

Two weeks was all the notice I got on this one, and I follow this stuff closely.