Who Moved My Moat?

Last year I watched Salesforce lay out its turn into an agentic company at Dreamforce, and it landed harder than an “aha.” It was an “oh, this changes everything” moment.

So I went and re-tested the code-generation features across Grok, Gemini, Claude, and OpenAI — and two things became obvious fast. AI drastically improved — building software was becoming cheap. The services we focus on would change. Our clients had already started asking ChatGPT how to create a user or add a field — the entry-level work — and trying it themselves. They still called us in to bring it home, but the direction was clear: clients were going to start servicing themselves in some areas.

Then the bigger realization. We didn’t need a large team of developers to deliver a project anymore. The value wasn’t in writing the code. AI can write code now — draft an architecture, harden security, even take the first creative pass. What it can’t hand you is everything around it: what’s worth building, how to get the most out of the AI itself, and what’s unique about how you run your business.

When I started Funnelists, I made a deliberate choice to keep it small. I’d already built the big version — I founded and built F1 Solutions into a fifty-person IT consulting firm back in the 90s and early 2000s. I know exactly what that scale costs: the endless meetings, the HR headaches, the politics, always fighting fires and cleaning up messes — managing people instead of building solutions. You lose the thing that made going to work in the morning exciting. So I kept Funnelists by referral only, limited networking, no social media campaigns — because I wanted to keep my hands in the code. That’s where the funn is: working with people I like, building solutions and delivering happiness.

For years, staying small was the only way to stay close to the code and focus on delivery. AI changes that: now we can take on more clients, more projects and stay focused on results without the large additions in headcount and overhead.

I knew at that point I had to go all in — eating, breathing, dreaming AI, new certifications. And I had to use AI to rebuild our entire platform — the whole company — to be AI-first, starting right now. Because even ten times faster isn’t ten times more code — it’s three decades of software experience and judgment moving at a speed I never had. Every system I’ve shipped, every hard lesson, every idea I sketched on a napkin or whiteboard and never had time to build — now I can build them.

So we built it into the funnAI foundation: a flexible architecture that’s ready for whatever comes next. That’s the real moat. We’ve built Salesforce portals for years; on this foundation we made our Portal Templates better and AI-native, and added the App Kit to deliver faster.

And here’s what I kept seeing in all my research. The new wave of builders ship fast, but most have never built an enterprise architecture. They don’t build in the audit tracking, the federated security, the multi-tenancy, multi-currency, multi-timezone that real companies run on. They don’t know how to build for companies.

Thirty years in, I’m still in the code, still having funn — and building the best work of my career. That’s my why.

— Troy