There was a stir in San Francisco’s tech ecosystem when Ira Bodnar, founder of startup Rise, claimed on social media platform X that Anthropic’s cloud AI The new update destroyed their business model almost overnight. He says that in the product category in which his company was growing rapidly, the AI features introduced in the same field have severely affected the sales rate by giving direct competition.
The controversy deepened when Anthropic and another AI firm Mans launched features that directly compete with Rise’s main product Google and its AI tools for managing meta ads. This development is being seen as a new example of ‘saapocalypse’ in the tech industry.
How did everything change suddenly?
Ira Bodnar wrote in his post that his company had added 100s of paid customers in just two months and maintained an impressive deal close rate of 70%, but the situation changed after a cloud update. She wrote, “This morning I woke up to find that the cloud had ruined my startup. Within two months, we had several hundred paying customers and our startup was growing rapidly. A feature of Cloud/Manas reduced our sales rate from 70% to 20%. The cloud had ruined our entire product line.”
What did Rise’s product do?
Bodnar explains how his product works, writing, “We built an AI agent that automates ad management for you. Like, you give it access to all your Google and Meta accounts and it will manage them for you. Awesome. Customers love it. Both Cloud and Manas have released connectors for Meta Ads. Cloud can’t make changes to ad accounts yet. It can only do analytics and it doesn’t have access to Google Ads but it will in a few months. So here’s Making something seems pointless.”
What changes did Rise do?
Sensing the potential risk, Rise’s team had started changing its strategy a few weeks ago. Now the company is focusing on building AI workflows for large advertising agencies, which manage hundreds of accounts with a small number of employees. Bodnar expressed confidence, “Our existing business will be fine anyway. We knew what was going to happen and we started proactively making changes a few weeks ago.”
Why worry about the future?
Ira Bodnar also expressed serious concerns about the future of digital content. He predicted that in the coming time, most of the social media platforms will be filled with AI activities. According to him, about 98% of the videos on platforms like TikTok and Instagram can be created and promoted by AI. In such a situation, success will depend more on understanding of algorithms and large-scale content creation than on creativity.
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