When Your AI Tool Is Just a Prettier ChatGPT
You have probably noticed this pattern by now. You run into a problem, search for a tool to solve it, and find a polished website promising exactly what you need. The screenshots look great, the copy sounds confident, and the pricing starts at €19 or €29 a month. You try the product and realize that underneath the branding, it is doing essentially the same thing ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or another major AI platform can already do directly.
This is where we see a potential bubble forming in the AI startup market. There are genuinely useful AI companies being built, but there is also a large number of businesses whose main innovation seems to be putting a nicer interface around somebody else’s model. A prompt becomes a feature, a collection of prompts becomes a dashboard, and suddenly it is marketed as specialized software for lawyers, marketers, recruiters, or entrepreneurs.
Using external AI models is not really the issue. Most modern technology companies depend on infrastructure they did not build themselves. The concern comes when there is very little left once you remove the underlying model. If the main advantage is a convenient button for something users can already ask a general purpose AI to do, the ground starts to feel a bit unstable.
It becomes especially noticeable as the major AI platforms keep improving. Features that justified a standalone subscription a year ago can suddenly become normal functionality inside the main models. Document analysis, research, image generation, data processing, writing assistance and increasingly complex workflows are gradually becoming part of the standard AI experience. A company building a thin layer around one of these capabilities is effectively competing with the supplier of their core technology.
There is also something a bit odd about the customer experience this creates. Someone searches for help writing a proposal, analyzing a document or generating a marketing plan. Instead of simply using the AI service they may already be paying for, they encounter another landing page, another account, another privacy policy and another monthly subscription. Sometimes the specialized product genuinely improves the workflow. Quite often, though, the customer is simply paying an intermediary to send a prompt to another company’s API. For us, this raises a question we try to keep in mind. What does a company actually own? If the answer is mainly branding, prompts and an API connection, the business might have limited protection when competitors appear or the underlying AI provider introduces similar functionality.
AI is creating plenty of opportunities, but attaching “AI” to a narrow use case does not automatically create a durable software company. The current market has lots of useful products, but it also has the characteristics of a gold rush: hundreds of companies selling slightly different versions of the same shovel. The businesses that survive will probably not be the ones with the prettiest wrapper. We think they will be the ones that use AI as part of something harder to replicate: proprietary data, deep industry knowledge, real integrations, established workflows, distribution, customer relationships or technology that provides value beyond the model itself.
