One to Watch: The Hidden AI Use Case

The AI headlines read like a turf war: OpenAI vs Grok vs Anthropic vs Google. Each one rolling out new features in a race to dominate the map. It’s a gang war of models, and every month another capability drops like a drive-by.

The collateral damage? Small apps that happen to stand in the path. They don’t die because they were bad ideas. They die because they tried to make a business out of one thing an LLM can now do natively. They got caught in the crossfire.

A dart to the heart

On the far end of the spectrum, you’ve got the multidimensional platforms. These aren’t single-use tools. They’re ecosystems. They roll many narrow workflows into one broader user journey, giving people a reason to stay inside the product for longer stretches of time. As the LLMs balloon outward with new capabilities, the platform balloons too—absorbing those new abilities and weaving them into the larger scope.

Think of it as scaffolding built to expand with the model’s growth. These products become more valuable because the LLMs keep expanding. But they require big budgets, long timelines, and heavy teams to stitch the pieces together.

That leaves the hidden lane: small, structured apps that simply do small things better.

Before, these apps weren’t worth building. The cost of coding and maintaining something for a tiny workflow outweighed the reward. But now the squeeze is easier. With LLMs doing the heavy lifting, a founder can focus on design, packaging, and structure—turning a narrow use case into a usable product.

Take our pitch practice app. Pitch nights used to mean fighting downtown traffic, waiting hours to present in front of a handful of people, and hoping you got meaningful feedback. Now? You can practice anywhere. The app decentralizes the experience, distributes it, and removes all the friction. It’s not trying to fight in the gang war. It’s not pretending to be a platform. It’s just a small app that does one thing better—and in doing so, it unlocks a use case that’s valuable, portable, and resilient.

That’s the “One to Watch” category. Not giant moonshots. Not throwaway toys. But structured, specialized apps that thrive quietly on the edge—precisely because they don’t need to win the war, and they don’t need to balloon into platforms. They just need to make one part of the journey radically easier.