The AI gold rush sells shovels
In 1849 the dependable fortunes went to the people selling picks and denim. The 2024 version has better branding and a monthly subscription.
The dependable money in 1849 wasn’t in the rivers. Gold was real, and a few people found it, but the fortunes you could count on belonged to the merchants selling picks, pans, and sturdy denim to everyone who believed they’d be the exception. The miners took the risk; the merchants took the cash.
We’ve been thinking about that a lot this year.
Because 2024 has a familiar shape. The technology underneath is genuinely remarkable, the way gold was genuinely gold. And around that real thing has formed a bazaar: courses on prompting sold by people who discovered the field in March, “AI-powered” stamped on features that shipped three years ago under a duller name, tools that promise to ten-x your content before anyone asks whether the content deserved a one-x, conference tickets, certification programs, newsletters about newsletters. The surest revenue in a boom is not from using the technology. It’s from selling equipment to the hopeful.
The gold is real
Let’s be precise about what we’re not saying. We’re not saying the technology is a mirage; we use it, and some of it has honestly startled us. The gold is real. That’s exactly what makes the shovel market so effective, because every exaggerated pitch gets to point at a genuine miracle somewhere upstream.
To be fair to the original merchants, there’s nothing shameful about selling shovels. A shovel is honest equipment when it’s sold as a shovel, priced like a shovel, and expected to dig. The trouble starts when the shovel gets marketed as the gold itself, when the pitch quietly shifts from “this tool digs” to “buying this tool is the strike.” That shift is happening across the industry right now, in demo videos and keynote stages and a thousand landing pages with the same gradient.
How to tell a capability from a shovel
A few field tests, learned the mildly expensive way:
- Capabilities survive week three. Everything demos well now. The question is whether anyone on your team still opens the thing once the novelty wears off and the real work returns.
- Capabilities are priced against value. Shovels are priced against fear. If the pitch spends more time on what you’ll miss than on what you’ll get, you’re holding a shovel.
- Check who the marketing is aimed at. Tools built to serve your customers talk about your customers. Tools built to harvest your budget talk about you, your competitors, and the closing window.
- A capability solves a problem you had before you saw the ad. If you need the ad to explain why you have the problem, sit with that for a minute.
- Renaming is not building. A surprising amount of the 2024 catalog is last decade’s software with a chat window bolted on and the price doubled.
Your inbox already knows all of this. Count the subject lines this week promising you’re about to be left behind. Urgency is the tell. Real capabilities don’t need a countdown timer, because their value doesn’t expire at midnight; manufactured opportunities do, because scrutiny is fatal to them and time invites scrutiny.
Urgency is the tell.
For the brands feeling the pressure
The FOMO is the product. Understand that and most of the panic dissolves. Nobody is keeping score on whether you announced an AI strategy this quarter, and your customers are keeping even less score than that. What they’ll notice is what they’ve always noticed: whether the work is good, whether the experience respects them, whether you seem to know who you are.
Our advice, the same in every boom, is calmer than the moment wants it to be. Adopt where you have a genuine bottleneck and a tool that genuinely clears it; we’ve done exactly that, in the places where it made our work faster without making it worse. Skip anything that exists mainly to be announced. And before betting anything you’d mind losing, give it eighteen months, because the brands that look silly in 2026 won’t be the careful ones. They’ll be the ones who bolted a chatbot onto everything that didn’t move.
Booms end the same way every time. The rivers give what they give, the bazaar packs up, and the people left standing are the ones who used the tools to build something that was worth building anyway.
When everyone around you is selling shovels, the interesting question isn’t which one to buy. It’s whether anyone has checked what’s actually in your ground.
