The AI revolution continues. September 11, 2026

When Andrew Page set up Strawman.com, Australia’s premier online investment club, artificial intelligence did not exist in any usable form. The work took years, cost a fortune, and was brutally hard. Now, reflecting on that journey with Motley Fool’s Scott Phillips, Page admits he is in two minds. On one hand, AI could have accelerated everything — development, marketing, savings. On the other, the very difficulty of building Strawman was a moat. “If you can do it, so can anyone,” he says. “The barriers to competition are gone.” The conversation that follows is not a prediction about AI’s long arc. It is a grounded, sometimes tense examination of what changes when software becomes a commodity, when brand stops being a shortcut, and when the asset that was supposed to be risk-free turns out to be anything but.

What AI erodes and what it leaves standing

Page and Phillips agree that pure software — code that just does calculations and record-keeping — is now a commodity. “I can create a bespoke customized bit of software that does everything I need it to do,” Page says. The old moat of technical difficulty has evaporated. What remains defensible, he argues, are two things: proprietary data and network effects. The companies that have those will be fine, as long as they lean into the change.