Horseless Carriages Are Still Here (benfromskope.substack.com)

YC partner Pete Koomen’s “horseless carriages” metaphor is being used to diagnose why most AI products feel incremental: they bolt new models onto old workflows instead of redesigning the work those models can do. The top 1% of AI products instead deliver a service-like experience—seamless, delightful, and prescriptive—because they combine elite engineering with deep customer understanding. Early AI efforts tend to be clunky “first iterations” that mimic human processes, and while marginally better, they don’t change outcomes or user experience in a meaningful way. The prescription is simple and consequential: ask “if a human didn’t have to do this job, how should it get done?” and design that system. Winners are building agents that actually replace labor—conversational customer support agents (Sierra, Intercom, Decagon), executive-assistant agents (Interaction Co), and voice-driven freight booking (Lanesurf)—and pricing them as services (per unit of work completed). That shift unlocks new monetization tied to labor spend, derisks buyers, and creates much bigger upside than traditional software licensing. For AI/ML teams, the implication is clear: invest in product redesigns that replace jobs end-to-end, not in incremental augmentations, to create truly valuable, scalable AI products.