A recent Wall Street Journal article profiled a growing number of companies generating millions of dollars in annual revenue with only one or two employees. Powered by artificial intelligence, these businesses represent a remarkable leap in productivity. They also offer a glimpse into a future where companies create extraordinary enterprise value with remarkably small workforces.
At the same time, many of the world’s largest companies are investing billions in artificial intelligence to automate routine work, streamline operations, and flatten their organizations. Across industries, leaders are asking the same question:
How can AI help us do more with fewer people?
For investors and large corporations, that may be exactly the right question.
But it cannot be the only one.
As I read the article, I found myself asking something different. I have spent years alongside founders who build businesses on Main Streets, not in tech hubs. For them, and for the communities that depend on them, the more urgent question is this:
If artificial intelligence changes how companies create value, how do we make sure that value continues to create jobs?
For most of modern economic history, business growth and job growth moved together. As companies expanded, they hired. Artificial intelligence is beginning to challenge that relationship. The companies profiled in the Journal show that extraordinary enterprise value can now be built with only a handful of employees.
That is not a failure of technology. But it changes one of the fundamental assumptions behind economic development.
For generations, growing businesses naturally created growing payrolls. If AI allows more companies to scale without adding people, then job creation can no longer be treated as an automatic byproduct of business growth.
It must become an intentional investment strategy.
History suggests this is exactly what every technological revolution has required.
Every Economic Revolution Needed a Second Strategy
Every transformational technology changes the economy.
The steam engine accelerated manufacturing. Electricity transformed production. The interstate highway system reshaped commerce. The internet connected the world.
Each dramatically increased productivity.
Yet none created widespread prosperity on its own.
Prosperity emerged because every breakthrough was followed by complementary investments that allowed more people and businesses to share in its success. Railroads connected factories to markets. Public education prepared workers for industrial jobs. Highways fueled the growth of logistics, hospitality, retail, and thousands of locally owned businesses. The internet created entirely new industries while helping millions of existing businesses reach new customers.
The pattern repeats itself throughout history. Innovation creates value. Strategic investment determines how broadly that value spreads.
Artificial intelligence is the next great economic transformation, and it deserves extraordinary investment. But history tells us that every transformational technology requires a second strategy—one that ensures the benefits of innovation reach far beyond the companies creating it.
The Main Street Strategy
The Main Street strategy is not an alternative to investing in artificial intelligence.
It is the complementary investment that every technological revolution has required.
It begins with a simple premise: while AI will help many companies create more value with fewer people, America must invest just as intentionally in the businesses where growth still creates jobs.
That means investing in founder-owned, place-based businesses that anchor local economies. Restaurants, healthcare practices, contractors, manufacturers, retailers, and service businesses may never become billion-dollar technology companies. They play a different role.
They turn productivity into employment.
And they are far harder to automate away than a spreadsheet or a support ticket. Their value lives in what AI cannot replace: a caregiver’s judgment, a contractor’s crew on the job site, the trust between a business and the neighborhood it serves. AI will make these businesses better—sharper forecasting, smarter scheduling, stronger customer engagement—but their growth will still be measured in people hired, not headcount avoided.
That is the Main Street strategy: pairing investment in transformative technology with investment in the businesses that turn innovation into broad-based economic opportunity.
Main Street Is America’s Economic Distribution System
Main Street is often called the backbone of the American economy.
Its role is even more important than that.
Main Street is the mechanism through which economic value spreads beyond individual companies and into local communities.
Nearly 35 million small businesses operate across the United States. Together they employ about 59 million people—close to half of the private-sector workforce—and, according to the Small Business Administration, they have created roughly two-thirds of all net new jobs since 1995.
Their impact reaches well beyond payroll.
When a neighborhood coffee shop opens a second location, it hires baristas and managers, signs another lease, buys more supplies, and draws customers to the businesses around it. A growing contractor adds crews, purchases equipment, and supports a network of local suppliers. Every expansion strengthens the commercial corridor around it.
Economists call this the local multiplier effect. Growth inside one business creates additional economic activity throughout the surrounding community.
That is what makes Main Street different.
It doesn’t simply create value.
It distributes value.
And that is precisely why investing in Main Street matters in the AI economy.
Where Opportunity Is Growing Fastest
The opportunity becomes even clearer when we look at where entrepreneurship is accelerating.
Latino entrepreneurs are starting businesses faster than any other group in the country. Between 2018 and 2023, the number of Latino-owned employer businesses grew by 44 percent, even as the number of white-owned businesses slightly declined, according to research from Stanford.
Yet the same research points to the real opportunity. Latino-owned businesses remain far less likely than their white-owned counterparts to grow past one million dollars in annual revenue. Closing that gap—helping these businesses reach the same average revenue as their peers—would add an estimated $1.1 trillion to the U.S. economy.
That single statistic reframes the challenge.
America does not need nearly as many new business starts as it needs more businesses that successfully scale.
Helping thousands of founder-owned businesses grow from ten employees to twenty would create an enormous economic ripple effect. Expanding from one location to three generates far more than revenue. It creates jobs, strengthens commercial corridors, increases demand for local suppliers, expands the tax base, and builds stronger local economies.
This may be one of the most overlooked investment opportunities of the AI era.
What Investing in Main Street Actually Requires
Recognizing the opportunity is not the same as seizing it.
Turning Main Street into a deliberate strategy takes the same discipline we bring to any serious investment. It means patient growth capital designed for businesses that scale by adding people, not just software. It means the kind of business diagnostics that help a founder see clearly what is holding growth back before more money is deployed. And it means the coaching, networks, and technical support that turn a strong local business into a regional one.
None of this happens on its own. Just as railroads, public schools, and highways were deliberate investments in a shared future, a Main Street strategy requires investors, institutions, and leaders who choose to build it.
The businesses are already here. The founders are already building. What they need is capital and support matched to how they actually grow.
Building the Next American Economy
Artificial intelligence will define the next generation of business innovation.
We should embrace that future.
History reminds us, however, that innovation alone has never been enough. Every major technological breakthrough has required complementary investments that turned productivity into widespread economic opportunity.
The AI economy needs that strategy today.
Not because Main Street competes with innovation.
Because it completes it.
