She Built an AI App for NYC Renters After Finding None

The same dynamic is playing out well beyond real estate. Sarah Dooley founded AI-Empowered Mom after realizing that AI productivity techniques she had used in technology consulting could reduce what she calls the household's mental load. "The mental load is really all of that invisible labor or ghost labor," Dooley told PYMNTS. "The cognitive labor that has to happen to keep a household running." Her AI assistant, Em, currently in beta, helps families plan meals, organize calendars, manage reminders and research purchases.

Parents are using ChatGPT to write personalized bedtime stories and draft communications to schools, Good Morning America reported. Meta is piloting StoryKit, an AI app that turns a child's photo and interests into a personalized story, in select countries, TechCrunch reported.

Small business owners are building invoicing tools and other back-office software without hiring a developer. Lovable features that use case prominently in its own marketing. In each case, the person building the tool is also the person who needs it.

The infrastructure that separated a consumer with a problem from a business that solved it is getting thinner. Several tools built on Lovable and Replit by individual users have acquired users without a funding round, a formal launch or a product team. The cost of building a working product has fallen from months of engineering time to hours of prompting. A problem that affects ten thousand people is too small for a venture-backed startup. It is large enough for one person with an AI coding tool to address and monetize.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that 48% of online shoppers used AI during their most recent purchase across surveys in the U.S., Brazil and the UAE. The same shift is appearing on the supply side: consumers are using AI not just to find and evaluate products, to build the tools they cannot find.