I’ve worked in the collectibles industry for most of my life. When the Blue Jays won the 1992 World Series, everyday fans suddenly wanted something tangible to remember it by, and the Canadian memorabilia market expanded almost overnight. That moment showed me there was real business infrastructure behind the nostalgia. Decades later during 2025, I began building CollectorLINK, a blockchain-based platform designed to bring structure and transparency to physical collectibles.
While building it, I integrated AI wherever it made practical sense. It helped draft documentation, organize complex metadata structures, refine legal language, and accelerate operational workflows. It became a thinking assistant — a way to compress time. But it did not replace human (well.. my) judgment.
So in the middle of a suddenly loud national debate about whether artificial intelligence will wipe out jobs or transform them, I share my real-world thoughts on my last year building a Canadian tech startup with AI now embedded directly into its operations.
I certainly didn’t start with a master plan for how AI would be used — I simply knew the tool was there. ChatGPT was already helping me write, so that part was obvious. As I began researching blockchain tokenization, it quickly became invaluable for organizing ideas, structuring documents, and pressure-testing my business plan.
But startups don’t run on ideas alone. They need logos. They need design.
So I tried AI for that too. The result was clear almost immediately: I needed a human designer. That became hire number one.
Hire number two was a developer. And despite all the noise right now about “vibe coding” and AI-built companies, no serious startup is getting off the ground without human direction. Not today. In my world, that’s not even a debate.
After a year of building a startup alongside AI, my conclusion is a lot simpler than the headlines would suggest. AI didn’t replace the people in my company. It helped me run my companies better.
I discovered the creative work still belongs to humans. Design, storytelling, editing, strategy — those are decisions, and decisions require judgment. But the administrative work — the arithmetic behind the scenes — is exactly where AI shines. Reconciling receipts, organizing financial records, producing the right forms. Those tasks don’t require taste or interpretation. They require accuracy.
There is a clear line I’ve observed over the past year. If a job requires taste, trust, negotiation or long-term relationship building, AI assists but does not replace. If a job is binary — correct or incorrect, yes or no — AI can manage it effectively.
Bookkeeping fell into the second category. Reconciling deposits, separating out HST tax amounts, generating summary reports — there is no such thing as “creative bookkeeping.” There is only accurate or inaccurate. AI handled those repetitive financial tasks with consistency which I felt allowed me at least right now, to delay the hiring a bookkeeper at this stage of the company’s development.
What AI changed was not the size of my workforce. It changed the shape of it.
The public conversation often frames AI in extremes: either it will replace us all, or it’s overhyped and harmless. My experience suggests something less dramatic and more practical. AI is exceptionally strong at repetitive, rules-based tasks. It is far less capable when judgment, reputation, and accountability are involved.
In other words, AI replaced totals. It did not replace decisions.
For me, building a startup didn’t feel like participating in a technological revolution. It felt like adopting a powerful new tool. The concrete still needed pouring. The contracts still needed writing. The relationships still needed earning.
AI helped. Humans built. And that’s a far less dramatic — but far more accurate — story.
That’s the pattern I’ve seen so far. AI hasn’t eliminated jobs inside my startup. If anything, it helped me get the company off the ground faster — which led to hiring real people sooner than I otherwise might have.
For now, at least, the robots aren’t running the company.
They’re just doing the bookkeeping.
Richard Budman (March, 2026)
