Services firms = the next $trillion company
Sequoia just named the model we’ve been building for two years.
Two years ago, we made a bet that most people thought was strange.
Instead of building software tools for marketers, we built a marketing team made of AI, not a platform or a copilot, but something that does the work and delivers the outcome the same way an agency would, except without the overhead built around human labor costs.
Last week, Sequoia Capital partner Julien Bek published an essay that essentially described what we’ve been building. He called it “Services: The New Software,” and his central argument is that the next trillion-dollar company won’t sell software at all, but will sell the work itself. The distinction matters enormously when you think about where the real money sits. Businesses spend roughly six dollars on services for every one dollar they spend on software, which means every AI tool and SaaS copilot competing for attention right now is chasing the much smaller pile. Whereas the model that follows the labor budget is playing a completely different, much larger game.
What shaped how we built FOMO.ai was that the brands we most wanted to work with weren’t shopping for tools at all; they just wanted leads and sales driven by AI Search!
So we positioned ourselves as a marketing team, one that works for your company the way an agency would, except the underlying cost of doing the work keeps falling as the models improve, which means the service gets better and cheaper over time rather than more expensive. And unlike a fully automated system, we keep humans in the loop by design, because sometimes that’s simply practical (for now), and sometimes a client just prefers knowing a person was part of the process. (See: “Analysts are saying ‘we are cooked‘ but human behavior has something to add.”)
Building a model that can flex between the two turns out to be a genuine competitive advantage rather than a compromise. The shift felt counterintuitive in some investor conversations, where everyone was talking about how software multiples couldn’t be achieved with humans in the process. Two years later, now it’s what many investors are actively looking for.
Bek maps out the sectors he believes are ripest for this kind of disruption, and the pattern he identifies is consistent: work that is already being outsourced, heavily reliant on processing and pattern matching rather than deep contextual judgment, and where the buyer has always been purchasing an outcome rather than a relationship. These are categories where AI can now perform the core task at a level that is genuinely hard to distinguish from a professional doing it manually, and where the structural case for replacing an outsourcing contract with an AI native provider is far simpler than the case for replacing internal headcount. Marketing fits that description perfectly, and we’ve been stress testing it long enough with real brands to know where it works well.
The production side, the content, the optimization, and the distribution across channels are largely solved problems at this point. What remains is a 1:1 human connection when it is wanted, and when it is needed to give the client the reassurance that what we’re doing is the right thing, to answer questions, to help with adoption and change management… and when only a human will do.
The part of Bek’s argument I find most compelling, and most urgent for anyone thinking about building in this space, is what happens to client relationships over time. When a brand embeds an AI team into its marketing operations, the dependency that develops is operational rather than transactional, and it compounds in a way that a software subscription simply doesn’t. The brand training, the quality benchmarks, the institutional knowledge about what works for that specific audience, all of it deepens with every campaign. And because the value being delivered improves as the underlying models improve, every new capability release becomes a tailwind rather than a threat. That’s the complete opposite of what it feels like to be selling tools right now, where the next model version might quietly make your product redundant.
Our clients sometimes call us an AI-native agency (as does Y Combinator), an SEO agency, or even a performance agency because that framing maps onto something they already understand and trust. When I talk to investors, I lean into the tech side of what we’ve built, because the margins we’re driving are SaaS+ margins, and that’s rightfully what serious investors want to be putting money into. Both descriptions are accurate, and the tension between them is actually a pretty good illustration of why this model is so interesting. We’ve built the underlying technology and infrastructure of a software company, but we go to market as something that feels to clients like an agency that happens to be better, faster, and cheaper than anything they’ve worked with before.
What genuinely excites me about where we sit right now is the optionality we’ve built. Having proven the model works, we can move in any direction from here, vertically into specific industries, owning the full marketing stack for brands in those sectors, or horizontally across every marketing service that follows the same pattern, where the outcome is measurable, the work is intelligence-heavy, and the buyer cares about results rather than process. AI Search is where we started because it’s where the biggest shift in buyer behavior is happening and where the case for an autopilot model is most obvious, but the infrastructure we’ve built spans channels and categories in a way a single-point solution never could. The category doesn’t have a single, clean name yet, and we’re still navigating the same language question that every company in this space faces. But the underlying logic is sound, the data confirms it every week, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching one of the most respected firms in venture capital arrive at the same conclusion from a very different direction.
Dax is the Co-Founder & CEO @ FOMO.ai, and the author of 84Futures.com, and is currently working to close out our final fundraising process.