I was having a red wine with a mate the other night — we were well into the second bottle so the conversation got a bit real. Fellow business owner, sharp guy. We got onto AI. He's bullish. I'm bullish. We've both been leaning into it hard.
Then he asked the question that stopped the conversation cold.
"Ben... what happens to my house price if a whole bunch of white-collar workers in Auckland lose their jobs? And what happens to the guy who cuts my hair in Commercial Bay (my mate's a bit flash!) if his customers stop coming in?"
I didn't have a great answer. I still don't, if I'm honest. But I've been sitting with that question ever since.
Here's What Is Happening in Plain Language
In late 2025, AI coding tools took a serious step up. A decent developer with the right tools could replicate a software product in weeks. Not perfectly, but well enough that the person buying it started asking: why am I renewing this SaaS contract when we could just build it ourselves?
I have a mate who was looking at buying some software to support his team. He had a development team in another one of his businesses, and when the vendor found out, they wouldn't show him all the features. Apparently they're doing product demos and potential customers are going off and building it themselves. Think about that for a second... A software company so worried about showing you what their product does, they'd rather lose the sale than risk you getting ideas.
That's not a healthy industry. That's an industry that knows it's in trouble. And now Claude Cowork and Open Claw are spawning 'white collar' agents all over the place! (That's bank speak for 'we are replacing humans with machines'.)
Last week on Aussie TV the Commonwealth Bank, which also owns ASB, announced a budget of over $NZD100m for AI based restructuring, with another 300 manager roles gone this week. The big four Aussie banks have laid off thousands of staff since mid-September 2025.
Here's the kicker. The top 20% of earners account for roughly 65% of all discretionary consumer spending. When those people lose their jobs, or take a 50% pay cut, the flow-on is enormous. That's your Commercial Bay barber. That's property values. That's a lot of our customers.
So What Does This Mean for Us?
This is a scenario, not a prophecy. You know I'm not in the doom-and-gloom business. But as owners, we live or die by being honest about what's in front of us. So here's what I keep coming back to.
Who are your customers, and what happens to their spending power if this plays out? If your business serves people or teams who depend on white-collar incomes — office workers, CBD foot traffic, professional services — it's worth asking whether their world looks the same in two years.
And are any of your moats made of friction? Hell, it's a question I've had to ask myself. If customers stay because switching is a hassle, or because they've always just 'used you', that's a fragile place to be. Genuine relationships, real expertise, community — that stuff works. Habit and convenience? Less so.
And here's the upside, because there absolutely is one. The same tools driving all this disruption are available to us right now. We're lean. We move fast. We don't have legacy cost structures to protect or boards demanding explanations.
A business owner in our world who picks up these tools early and runs hard has a real advantage — not just over other small operators, but over everyone.
The Canary Is Still Alive
'You're not reading this in the crisis. You're reading it before it. The feedback loops haven't started yet.'... We still have time!
The business owners I know who got through COVID weren't the ones who panicked. They were the ones who read the changes early, made some hard decisions ahead of the crowd, and stayed close to their customers.
Maybe I'm wrong about how fast this moves. I hope I am. But I'd rather be wrong and prepared than right and caught flat-footed.
This isn't the time to put your head down and hope it blows over. It's the time to get a guide, talk to your peers, and think clearly about where your business is genuinely valuable — and where it might be more exposed than you'd like to admit.
The world is moving fast. But it always has been. And the misfits in our tribe — the ones who never really fit the old corporate model anyway — we tend to do alright in the weird times.
Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!
