Co-Ownership, Not Rental
Most people’s relationship with AI right now is pure rental. You pay a subscription, you use the tool, the tool gets better for everyone but you specifically do not get to capture that upside. You are a customer, not a stakeholder. That is fine as a starting point, but it is not where you want to stay.
The more powerful position is co-ownership. When you have equity or meaningful stake in the technology you use, your incentives flip completely. Now you are not just a user hoping the product improves. You are someone who benefits when it improves, and therefore someone who is naturally motivated to make it better. You bring real-world use cases, edge cases, industry relationships, and feedback that generic users cannot provide. That is genuinely valuable and it should be compensated as such.
Think about what this looks like practically. If you are a trusted professional in a specific industry and you are partnering with an AI team to build tools for that industry, your contribution is not just testing the product. You are providing access to the network, credibility with buyers, and the lived experience that keeps the product grounded in actual problems. Someone should be creating something like “McMichael Technologies” rather than waiting for a generic startup to figure out the security industry from the outside. Time is not unlimited. Someone is going to realize that the most trusted person in a given essential industry is the perfect co-founder for an AI company serving that industry. If that person is not you, it will be someone else.
The practical implication is to stop thinking about AI as a cost of doing business and start thinking about it as a potential equity play. What technology is being built for your industry right now? Who is building it? Do they have the domain trust you have? If not, you have something to offer that goes beyond a subscription. That is the co-ownership conversation worth having.
One thing I would add: co-ownership requires discernment about who you are partnering with. Every AI platform encodes a set of values in how it handles your data, what it optimizes for, and who it ultimately serves. Not every company building in your industry deserves your equity, your trust, or your domain expertise. Before you bring what you have to the table, evaluate whether the people on the other side of that table are building something aligned with how you want to show up in the world.
Key Takeaway
Co-ownership means you have upside when the technology improves, not just access; that alignment of incentives changes everything about how you show up.