Why The AI Layoff Story Is Missing The Small Business Boom Underneath
Why The AI Layoff Story Is Missing The Small Business Boom Underneath
Publish Date: 2026-07-12 17:27:00
Source Domain: www.forbes.com
Artificial Intelligence may be helping to start more businesses than its hurting (Photo by Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV / AFP) (Photo by KIRILL KUDRYAVTSEV/AFP via Getty Images)
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At 2 a.m. in Tel Aviv last spring, a former data-company CEO named Maor Shlomo woke to his phone alarm, walked to his laptop, and confirmed his servers were still running. He did this every two to three hours for months. He had no team. He had built a software company called Base44 by himself in four months using AI coding tools, and the alarm was the only thing between his platform and a six-hour outage. On a night when the site went down under a traffic spike, Fortune reported, he caught it in ten minutes. In June 2025, Wix acquired his company for $80 million.
This story isn’t an anomaly. Every founder in my network has a story like it. At a small dinner in San Francisco last month, a founder I’ve known since 2018 described her company to the table like this: “It’s me, my dog, and about 40 AI agents.” She was not being cute. She had exited her last startup, taken six months off, and quietly built a compliance software product that now serves close to 300 customers. Payroll is one person. Her team, functionally, is a wall of subscriptions to Claude, ChatGPT, Replit, and a dozen agentic tools I’d never heard of.
Every founder at the table nodded like they knew someone doing the same thing. Half of them were.
The dominant coverage still frames AI as a headcount-reduction story: cuts at Meta, layoffs at Oracle, cuts across engineering, marketing, and middle management. That story is real. What it misses is what is happening on the other side of the ledger.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics, Americans filed 1.56 million new business applications between November 2025 and January 2026, the largest three-month stretch on record since the series began in 2004. January alone saw 532,319 filings, 36.8 percent above the same month a year earlier….
