The next frontier of innovation is coming back to the physical world

AI is poised to solve software creation, making it a ubiquitous utility and shifting innovation's frontier from digital to physical, according to Kadhir Mani. The author argues that as software becomes cheap and accessible, the next great challenges will involve aligning AI with human goals to tackle real-world problems.

A Dose of Hope for the Future by Kadhir Mani 7 minutes <section data-section-id='2a49688f-1eb1-4aac-b312-857a36dc9fef' <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The conversation around artificial intelligence often gravitates toward apocalyptic scenarios. Are we hurtling toward societal collapse as machines replace human purpose and productivity?</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I've been thinking about these scenarios a lot. They reflect concerns about rapid technological change and its impact on our lives, livelihoods, and communities.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" But after talking to countless people working in the space, I now feel that we're asking the wrong question.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I think the "AI endgame" isn't an ending at all, but rather the foundation for something unprecedented — a world where the physical frontier becomes our next great challenge, where alignment between people and AI defines what we can accomplish, and where the problems that have always mattered most finally come within reach.</span </p <p <br </p </section <section data-section-id='e2617a33-30e5-40d6-b4fb-84cee3d63c51' <h2 id='e2617a33-30e5-40d6-b4fb-84cee3d63c51' Software as a solved problem</h2 <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I have a new perspective: AI is fundamentally "solving" software in much the same way that previous technological revolutions solved their respective domains.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Consider electricity. Once a marvel that required specialized knowledge to generate, distribute, and utilize, it has become an invisible utility that powers nearly every aspect of modern life. We don't think about electricity as a problem to solve anymore, we simply expect it to work.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The same transformation occurred with telecommunications and networking. The internet, once a complex system requiring deep technical expertise to navigate and utilize, is now a foundational layer that we take for granted, enabling everything from global commerce to instant communication.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" This doesn't mean innovation in these domains has ceased. Electrical grids continue to evolve with renewable energy integration and smart distribution systems. Telecommunications advances with 5G and beyond. Networking protocols improve continuously. But the fundamental problem, how to reliably deliver electricity, connect people across distances, or transmit data between computers, is solved.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" These technologies have become stable, predictable foundations upon which entirely new categories of innovation are built.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I think that software is undergoing this same transformation through AI. When I say AI will "solve" software, I mean that the creation, maintenance, and modification of software will become automated, accessible, and reliable enough that it transitions from being a specialized craft requiring years of training into a ubiquitous utility available to anyone who needs it.</span </p <p <br </p </section <section data-section-id='66dba802-ac36-4c49-924b-502ad05b44e9' <h2 id='66dba802-ac36-4c49-924b-502ad05b44e9' The consequences</h2 <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Building in the digital world is becoming cheap, fast, and accessible to anyone with a problem worth solving.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The most significant consequence of this, to me, is that </span <b <strong style="white-space: pre-wrap;" software is losing its alpha.</strong </b <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" For decades, the complexity of building software was a moat. Big tech companies built products in ways that were nearly impossible for competitors to replicate without massive engineering teams and years of runway. That complexity premium is disappearing, and with it, the margin structure that the entire industry has taken for granted.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" This has a cascading effect. Goods and services that remain purely digital — software that exists only as software — face brutal pressure toward commoditization. Users will expect dramatically more for their money because they'll increasingly understand just how cheap it is to produce.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" But this isn't a new cycle. Every technological revolution went through this exact transition, from scarce craft to invisible foundation.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Electricity ceased to be a competitive differentiator the moment it became a utility. The same happened with telecommunications, and then the internet. In each case, the complexity premium evaporated, the industry panicked, but then something remarkable happened:</span </p <p <br </p <p <callout icon="rocket" color=" 3E63DD" The world built something entirely new atop what was now taken for granted.</callout </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I think software is next in that lineage. And if history is any guide, the real story isn't what we're losing, it's what becomes possible once that foundation is laid.</span </p <p <br </p </section <section data-section-id='467d578c-8710-4572-ab6d-da9e42ea5b6d' <h2 id='467d578c-8710-4572-ab6d-da9e42ea5b6d' The next frontier</h2 <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" When anyone can build anything digital, I think the new frontier that opens up is the </span <b <strong style="white-space: pre-wrap;" physical world</strong </b <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" .</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Let me explain.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" There's a version of this story that frightens people: AI takes the jobs, and nothing fills the void. But I find myself increasingly unconvinced by that version. Capitalism has a self-correcting mechanism that gets overlooked amid the panic: you cannot sell goods and services to people with no income.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The more compelling story is that we will discover something new once the constraint of "this requires ten engineers and two years" is lifted. We always find new ways to stay busy.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" And when you ask people what they'd build if building were free? They don't say another SaaS product.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" They say they want to fix climate change. They want better healthcare for their parents. They want to understand why diseases go underfunded, why food gets wasted while people go hungry, why drug discovery moves at a glacial pace when lives are on the line, etc.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" These are the problems that have always mattered most, and they've always lived in the physical world, often so daunting, beyond our reach.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I'll be honest. My gut reaction to believing that everything will be solved by unlimited software is still hesitation. But, that's more hope than I've felt in years </span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I don't know if we'll "just" solve climate change, cure cancer, or eliminate preventable suffering. But for the first time, the instinctual answer for me isn't "that's too hard." If we can truly build anything in the digital world with just a thought, maybe, just maybe, some of these problems aren't as insurmountable as they once were.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Something fundamental has shifted. The scales are tipping. And the next chapter of human ambition might be pointed at the problems that deserve it most.</span </p <p <br </p </section <section data-section-id='d3dd4744-9868-425b-a643-7a4d62402ae7' <h2 id='d3dd4744-9868-425b-a643-7a4d62402ae7' Why I'm at ProductNow</h2 <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" So if the next great frontier is the physical world, why am I here, building a product tool?</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" It's a question I've sat with honestly. And the answer I keep landing on is this: almost every hard problem I've run into in my career wasn't ultimately a technical one. The hardest problem, the one that quietly kills more good ideas than any engineering challenge, is getting a group of people to agree on what to do and work together.</span </p <p <br </p <p <b <strong style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Alignment.</strong </b </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" It sounds simple until you spend a decade watching brilliant teams fail at it.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Teams working on the world's most important problems still struggle to decide what to build next week. Organizations with unlimited funding lose months to decisions that were never clearly made, to small misunderstandings that compound into major course changes.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The problem isn't talent or ambition. It's that humans are bad at maintaining shared understanding at scale. And that problem is only getting harder as AI becomes part of the team. More actors, more context, more chances for things to quietly fall out of sync.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" To me, this is a deeply human and deeply physical problem. Alignment isn't a software bug you can patch. It requires people with different backgrounds, incentives, and blind spots to agree. That process is nuanced and messy.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" ProductNow is working on exactly this. What we're building is infrastructure for shared understanding: a place where the thinking behind decisions lives alongside the decisions themselves.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" Gathering signal, setting the direction, and execution stay in contact. Not through another meeting or a Slack thread that gets buried, but as a natural layer of how the work is documented and shared.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" What we're building is natural alignment between humans and agents to drive better outcomes, faster.</span </p <p <br </p </section <section data-section-id='15ff89e4-435f-48c1-be2e-4f22323ea6e4' <h2 id='15ff89e4-435f-48c1-be2e-4f22323ea6e4' Teams of tomorrow</h2 <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The teams that tackle the hardest problems in the physical world will need to understand, to think, and to move together.</span </p <p <br </p <p <callout icon="target" color=" 3E63DD" Alignment is upstream of everything. You can't cure a disease without a team that agrees on the approach. You can't build a city without people who share a vision of what it's for.</callout </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" This is why the moment we're in feels so exciting to me. AI is making it possible to build software that actually understands context: software that helps a team see what's been decided, why, and by whom. We've always known alignment matters. Now we might actually be able to build tools worthy of that problem.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" The teams of tomorrow will be mixed: people and AI working side by side, pursuing the same goals, and needing to stay in sync.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" But here's the uncomfortable truth: the ways we work today weren't designed for this. The rituals, the handoffs, the review cycles, the whole rhythm of how a team takes an idea from conception to shipped product. All of it was built around human pace, human communication, human judgment, and human accountability. Autonomous agents don't fit neatly into any of it.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" This is the challenge that keeps me up at night, and the one I'm most excited to work on. The future of team productivity isn't about plugging AI into today's processes. It's about rethinking those processes from the ground up.</span </p <p <br </p <p <span style="white-space: pre-wrap;" I want to build the tools that make that collaboration possible. Tools that help any team, however it's composed, to think clearly, decide well, and move in the same direction.</span </p <p <br </p <p <feedback data-feedbacknodeid="b4e2d3c5-f6a7-8901-bcde-f23456789012" data-title="Does this resonate with you?" data-datatype="SINGLE SELECTION" data-metadata="{"options": "👍 Yes","🤔 Maybe","👎 No" ,"type":"SINGLE SELECTION"}" </feedback </p <p <feedback data-feedbacknodeid="7475be05-48a3-47e6-9683-717fb653f810" data-title="What are your thoughts?" data-datatype="TEXT" data-metadata="{"type":"TEXT"}" data-description="Tell us what you think " </feedback </p </section