Only A Few AI Platforms Can Survive
The Next Platform, Wednesday, February 11th, 2026
It does not happen very often in the history of business that an orthogonal product is invented that almost immediately doubles the revenue pool of a market and has the prospect of tripling it over the next handful of years. But that is precisely what GenAI has done for the information technology sector.
It is an amazing thing to behold, a second wave of computing overlaying and possibly replacing a lot of the functionality of the original wave.
The question is, will this GenAI proliferation just allow the big to just get bigger, or will there be a proliferation of suppliers in the AI stacks of the world, a true Cambrian explosion? We are optimistic at The Next Platform, and favor competition and diversification wherever and whenever it is possible. But economic pressure always forces a consolidation and a die-off, and only a few - we will not call them the strongest - survive. Sometimes it is the small or the clever is the one that survives.