Let me tell you which parts of the AI market are overheated and which are undervalued.
Based on what I see in actual deployments, not LinkedIn hype.
Overheated (too much money chasing too few real use cases):
- General-purpose AI chatbot wrappers with no defensible moat
- "AI-powered" versions of products that work fine without AI
- AI startups valued at 100x revenue with no path to profitability
- Enterprise AI platforms that solve problems nobody has
Undervalued (massive opportunity, not enough attention):
- AI for manufacturing and industrial applications
- Multilingual AI for non-English markets
- AI infrastructure tooling (evaluation, monitoring, testing)
- AI for small and medium businesses
- Vertical AI for regulated industries (healthcare, legal, finance)
- Edge AI and on-device intelligence
- AI safety and evaluation tools
The pattern: consumer-facing, English-first AI is crowded. B2B, non-English, regulated, and infrastructure AI is wide open.
If you're choosing where to build your career, don't follow the crowd to the crowded spaces. The biggest opportunities are in the verticals that don't make it to TechCrunch headlines.
The engineers working on multilingual healthcare AI in India will have more job security and impact than those building the 500th ChatGPT wrapper.
Zig when everyone else zags.