AI's new primitives

How the next breakout consumer technology companies might emerge.

“Technology changes, but people don’t.”
― David von Drehle, The Book of Charlie

One way to think about the history of technology is as a series of new solutions to the same old human problems, needs and desires.

While technology does change us in ways both good and bad, our fundamental needs—for food, shelter, love, belonging and self-actualization—have remained constant for thousands of years.

What does change are the ways technology improves our ability to meet those needs, and the companies that figure them out at scale sometimes end up creating billions or trillions of dollars of value.

How does this process of distilling new technology into breakout products happen? I find it helpful to think in terms of primitives.

Breakthrough products are built from new primitives

Every major technology shift introduces new primitives: foundational capabilities that serve as the building blocks for new products.

Take mobile. The introduction of the iPhone and its imitators unleashed four major primitives:

• Multi-touch screens, enabling intuitive, gesture-driven interactions.

• Ubiquitous connectivity, ensuring continuous internet access wherever you are.

• Location awareness (GPS), making precise real-time positioning universally available.

• High-quality cameras in everyone’s pocket.

The most transformative products of the mobile era weren't desktop applications adapted to smaller screens—they were novel experiences that could only have been built using these new primitives.

Consider three iconic mobile products:

• Tinder used touch (swipe gestures), location awareness, and camera integration to reinvent dating. Before mobile, online dating meant browsing static databases on desktop computers. The swipe-based UI and geolocation created an entirely new model of casual, immediate, and localized interactions.

• Uber used ubiquitous connectivity and precise GPS to build a real-time transportation marketplace that couldn't have worked on desktops or laptops. Instantly summoning a ride, tracking its arrival in real-time, and frictionlessly paying upon arrival transformed personal transportation.

• Pokémon GO combined GPS, camera-based augmented reality, and ubiquitous connectivity to pioneer mainstream location-based gaming, creating a global cultural phenomenon.

Each of these examples relied on multiple primitives working together to create something genuinely new.

What are AI’s primitives?

But what exactly are the primitives of AI?

Unlike mobile, whose primitives are easy to intuit from its hardware, AI feels more abstract—it’s not a device so much as an emergent yet inscrutable machine god.

Still, let’s give it a shot:

• Content Plasticity: AI enables effortless transformation of content between different modalities—text, image, video, voice, or code—at near-zero marginal cost. This dramatically reduces the barriers to content creation, remixing, and adaptation.

• Agentic Abstraction: AI systems can abstract away complex multi-step processes behind simple, high-level user intentions. Users specify their goals, and the AI handles the messy execution details transparently.

• Conversational UI: Just as touchscreens became the default interaction model for mobile, natural language (spoken or typed) is emerging as the universal interface for AI-native apps. This unlocks products that are simultaneously simpler yet more powerful—an extremely rare combination.

• Deep Personalization: Traditional personalization mainly determined what content was shown to users - which tiles Netflix shows you, what songs and playlists Spotify suggests to you. AI enables generative personalization—customizing not just the content, but also how software interacts, communicates, and adapts its interface based on deep understanding of individual preferences, behaviors, and context. For the first time, we have software that is capable of displaying (or at least faking) personality and empathy.

AI-native products

I suspect the most transformative AI-native consumer products are yet to be built. We're still early, and entrepreneurs are just starting to experiment with these primitives to discover new categories.

One product I think about a lot is Boardy. Boardy aims to make valuable connections for you, much like a trusted friend or colleague. It does this by talking to you on the phone about your interests, your work and what kind of people you’d like to meet.

Talking to Boardy is an uncanny but surprisingly enjoyable experience. Despite the occasional telltale lengthy pause (something he tells you to anticipate up front in a canny bit of UX design), I found myself quickly opening up to him (I say him because he sounds like a friendly Aussie).

Here’s our last conversation.

Will Boardy deliver on its promise of a deeply personalized social network? I’ll find out when he reaches out with my first intro, but I’m intrigued and most importantly, interacting with it feels like something genuinely new and native to the AI era.

Conclusion

I suspect the founders that create the next category-defining companies will be those who find creative ways to combine these emerging primitives to address timeless human needs. For all our technological advancement, we still seek connection, understanding, creative expression, and mastery over our environment.

For startups, this represents an extraordinary opportunity, because technological platform shifts can weaken moats and reshuffle competitive advantages. While some incumbents like Facebook successfully navigated the transition from desktop to mobile, many once-dominant companies failed to adapt. And entirely new categories emerged that enabled companies like Uber to become giants.

The most exciting question isn't which primitives will define the AI era, but rather: which previously impossible solutions to age-old human problems will they finally make possible? And who will be bold enough to build them?

If you are, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks to Ryan Rigney for applying his keen editorial eye to a draft of this essay.