Last week I ran one of our Shift Collective AI town halls: a closed-door session with a group of B2B software founders, under Chatham House rules.
No names. No recordings. Just founders saying the things they won't say on stage.
I started with a temperature check: rate yourself one to ten - how much has your day-to-day work genuinely changed because of AI?
The most common answer was nine.
Not in theory. Not aspirationally. Actually changed. As in: the way they work today is structurally different from how they worked 18 months ago.
That number stayed with me. Because nine is not 'I use ChatGPT occasionally'. Nine is 'I cannot imagine going back'. And one founder put it plainly when I asked the follow-up: if AI disappeared tomorrow, how would you feel?
"I'd be screwed."
What follows is what else came out of that room. Anonymised, but real.
THE DATA POINT: SHIFT COLLECTIVE AI TOWN HALL
Seven questions. Twenty founders. Chatham House rules.
All data is from a single closed-door session: not a survey, not a panel, not a curated highlight reel. This is what founders said when nobody was performing.
Q: Rate 1–10: how much has your day-to-day work genuinely changed because of AI?
Most common answer: 9/10
One outlier gave it a three - smaller SaaS company where the founder was using AI, but every AI-related decision had to be driven down to the team by him personally. The bottleneck wasn't the technology. It was the org.
Q: Are you building AI capabilities in-house, stitching together third-party tools, or mostly watching and waiting?
The majority: watching and waiting.
One founder had rebuilt internal platform APIs using AI - replacing paid third-party tools and saving hundreds of pounds a month. Most hadn't gone that far. Build versus buy versus wait is still an open question for most of the room.
Q: Is AI expanding your addressable market or compressing it?
Majority: don't know yet.
Nobody had seen a material difference either way. The expansion or compression question is still theoretical for most founders at the €1M-€20M ARR stage. They can see the logic, but not the numbers.
Q: Has anyone changed their pricing model because of AI?
Nobody.
Zero out of twenty. Not a single founder in the room had changed their pricing model. This is the most striking finding. Every investor, every analyst, every keynote speaker says pricing is where AI disruption hits hardest. The founders closest to it haven't moved yet.
Q: What's the single AI tool or habit that's had the biggest personal impact on how you work?
Most common answer: Claude.
Unprompted. Not a room full of Anthropic customers by design, just the answer that came up most when founders named what had actually changed their working life.
Q: Has AI changed how you make decisions? Are you more data-driven?
Yes, but with a caveat.
More data-driven, but with a persistent checking overhead. AI output is faster, but it needs verification. The net result: more time on deep thinking, less time on execution. Most founders said they're spending more time on strategic decisions since AI took over more of the routine work. That's a significant shift in how a founder's day is structured.
Q: If AI didn't exist tomorrow, how would you feel?
"I'd be screwed."
One founder, unequivocal. Others laughed - but not in disagreement.
WHAT THIS ACTUALLY MEANS
Three findings from that room that I keep coming back to:
The nine is real, and it's personal, not organisational.
The founder who gave it a three wasn't using AI less. He was using it, but the friction was in getting his team to move with him. The bottleneck at this stage of the transition isn't technology, it's the gap between how fast the founder is moving and how fast the organisation can follow. That gap is the thing nobody's writing frameworks about yet.
Nobody has changed their pricing model. That's a warning sign.
Not because they should have done it already but because the window is narrowing. The founders who are nine out of ten on personal AI adoption haven't translated that into how they charge. There's a lag between how deeply AI has changed how founders work and how they're communicating that value to customers. When that lag closes, and it will, the pricing conversation is going to be abrupt, not gradual.
The LinkedIn inbox is broken. And most founders don't know it yet.
One founder in the room had stopped checking his LinkedIn DMs entirely. Too much AI outreach noise, not enough signal. He's not alone. I suspect this is spreading quietly through the founder community right now. The implication for anyone running outbound: the channel is degrading faster than the tools admit. If your growth motion depends on LinkedIn outbound, that's worth stress-testing this quarter, not next year.
ONE MORE NUMBER
I shared this in the town hall and it generated more discussion than anything else:
For ten years, the number of SaaS companies globally was consistently reported at around 30,000. Recent data suggests there are now 200,000 AI-native software startups — with some projections pointing toward a million.
The barriers to building software are now close to zero. Anyone can create an MVP. The hard part, the part that Shift AI exists to help with, is everything that comes after the build: getting to product-market fit, pricing it, selling it, scaling it.
The number of companies in the market is about to explode. The number of founders who know how to build a real business from a working product is not growing at the same rate. That gap is where the next decade of founder community gets built.
ONE QUESTION:
What number would you give yourself on that one-to-ten scale, and more importantly, what's the single thing that moved you there?
Hit reply. I'm building a broader dataset from these conversations. If enough of you answer the same way, it becomes next month's benchmark issue.
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. We run these town halls monthly inside Shift Collective: the closed-door community for founders navigating the AI transition. If you want to be in the room for the next one rather than reading about it after, reply to this email and I'll send you the details.
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shift.ai
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