There is an old saying about gold rushes: the people who reliably get rich are not the prospectors but the ones selling picks and shovels. The AI boom has its own version of this truth. While attention focuses on the labs building flashy models, some of the clearest financial winners have been the companies supplying the hardware everyone needs. Their soaring revenues are one of the most telling signals of where the market really is.
The Suppliers Who Sell to Everyone
Whatever model wins, whatever app goes viral, it almost certainly runs on specialised chips from a small group of suppliers. That position — selling the essential ingredient to every competitor at once — has translated into dramatic revenue growth for the leading hardware makers. They profit regardless of which AI products succeed, which is a far safer bet than picking individual winners.
Why This Pattern Repeats
Picks-and-shovels dynamics show up in every technology wave, from railways to the internet. The infrastructure layer captures value early and steadily, because it is a prerequisite for everything built above it. In AI, that layer is compute hardware today, but it also includes cloud platforms, data tooling and the services that make models usable. Following the infrastructure is often more revealing than following the headlines.
The Lesson for Marketers
You are not buying chips, but the principle still applies to how you read the market. The most durable value in any boom tends to sit with the enablers — the tools and platforms that everyone needs regardless of trends. When choosing where to invest your own time and budget, favour the dependable infrastructure of your workflow over whatever is briefly fashionable. Foundations outlast fads.
Following the Value, Not the Hype
The picks-and-shovels lens is ultimately about discipline. In a noisy market full of bold claims, the question worth asking is always: what does everyone here actually need to succeed? The answers — reliable compute, solid data, dependable platforms — point to where durable value sits. Apply the same thinking to your own decisions, and you will spend less time chasing whatever is trending and more time building on foundations that will still be standing when the current excitement fades.
Source: Our World in Data — Artificial Intelligence.
The picks-and-shovels lesson for marketers
The old gold-rush wisdom — that the reliable money is in selling picks and shovels rather than prospecting — has a useful parallel for marketers navigating the AI boom. You do not need to bet on which AI application will win to benefit from the wave. The steadier play is to build durable marketing fundamentals that pay off no matter which specific tools come out on top: a deep understanding of your customer, a distinctive brand, and a disciplined testing and measurement habit. Those are your picks and shovels, and they hold value across every twist of the hype cycle.
Own the layer that lasts
Individual AI tools will rise and fall, get acquired and reinvented. What persists is the marketer’s core asset: the relationship with an audience and the knowledge of what moves it. Investing in that enduring layer — your first-party understanding of customers, your brand, your creative judgement — is the marketing equivalent of selling supplies to prospectors. It is where value accumulates while the tools underneath keep changing.
Use the boom without being used by it
The practical stance is to adopt AI tools enthusiastically for what they do well while keeping your strategy independent of any single one. Let the boom lower your production costs and speed up your workflow, but anchor your competitive position in the fundamentals that no vendor can sell or take away. That way you profit from the gold rush without staking everything on a claim that may not pan out.