AI for Founders with Ryan Estes Reality check every founder needs in 2026
It’s late December energy. The year’s basically over. The cookies are gone, the group chats are quiet, and this is the one moment where you’re allowed to stop shipping long enough to look back.
Because 2025 was insane for AI. Every week felt like a new launch, a new model, a new panic, a new promise that this one would change everything. Faster code. Cheaper labor. Smarter agents. Louder fear. And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, a lot of founders quietly fell behind without realizing it.
That’s why this moment matters. Not to chase headlines, but to understand what actually shifted.
Ran Aroussi has been building software for 30 years, and what he’s seeing isn’t hype. It’s pressure. In 2025, delivery timelines got cut in half. Clients didn’t ask for less. They asked for more, faster. AI didn’t end projects early. It turned the same teams into factories. MVPs shipped sooner, and instead of stopping, they kept going. More features. Better architecture. Automated workflows. Less “we’ll clean this up later.”
Here’s the part founders miss. The advantage isn’t the model. It’s the system around it. If your onboarding breaks at scale, if your backend can’t handle growth, if your workflows still assume humans for everything repetitive, AI just exposes the weakness faster. That’s where teams like Automaze step in, acting like a technical co-founder, rebuilding foundations while AI quietly takes over the expensive, soul-crushing work you assumed required more headcount.
And looking ahead to 2026, the big question isn’t capability. It’s trust. Agents can already do more than we’re comfortable admitting. The real winners will be the founders who learn how to delegate to AI without surrendering judgment. Copilots turn into coworkers. Systems get quieter. Interfaces disappear. Output goes up. And the margin between leaders and laggards gets brutal.
So here’s the question worth sitting with. If your company doubled its output overnight, would it give you freedom, or would it just raise expectations and tighten the leash?
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https://automaze.io/
https://aiforfounders.co/
https://mxi.org/
https://x.com/aroussi
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https://ambient.us
https://codestory.co
https://warmstart.ai
https://kitcaster.com/application
https://ryanestes.info