The Biggest Threat to AI Right Now Is Helium
The biggest threat to AI right now isn't regulation, competition, or hallucinations. It's helium.
A missile strike in Qatar three weeks ago knocked out 33% of the world's helium supply. Helium is irreplaceable in chip fabrication. No helium, no chips, no GPUs, no AI infrastructure. The billions in hyperscaler spending this year assumes chips arrive on time. That's no longer a safe bet.
You probably don't care about helium markets. But you should care about this: your AI tools sit on top of supply chains you can't see and can't control.
Two things every business owner should be doing right now:
Stop paying AI to do things that don't need AI. This is the most expensive mistake I see. People running AI around the clock for a job that a simple automated process handles better, faster, and cheaper. (It's like paying a consultant to flip your lights on every morning when a timer would do the job.) Let AI build the solution, then get out of the way.
Own your stack where you can. Self-hosted tools (n8n is a great example) let you run your automations on your own servers and add AI only where it actually earns its keep. That's resilience.
The businesses that weather this well won't be the ones who avoided AI. They'll be the ones who understood what they built on.