Launching Our Five Core Frameworks to Separate Winners from Losers in the “AI Changes Everything” Chorus: Optimal’s Coverage of the Technology Ecosystem 

By Sanji Alwis and Jack Hermann Published on July 14, 2026 PDF

One feedback loop drives the boom: chatbot hype and record user adoption, automation gains for developers, fast-growing revenue at the AI labs, and FOMO. It has lifted all three of our subsectors: Infrastructure, Software, and Tech Megacaps.

Our Five Core Frameworks of Assessment: (a) Scarcity, Not Centrality, Determines AI Value Capture; (b) Endpoint & Customer Graph Ownership Still Determines Value Capture; (c) Strategic Capital & Circularity; (d) Revenue Quality & Durability; (e) Platform Shift, Binding Constraint & Incumbency.

Applying our frameworks and decades of operating experience in technology, we conclude that the product and ecosystem dominance of Apple (AAPL) and Alphabet (GOOG) is almost certain to persist.

We use the same lens to indicate that leading labs such as OpenAI and Perplexity are overhyped. They are unlikely to escape the crowded, commoditizing middle of the AI stack, where Optimal’s proprietary “TrueTAM” analysis puts their addressable market in a narrow to medium band of the software & related services market.

AI agents should help the strongest vertical-software incumbents, such as Toast (TOST) and Shopify (SHOP), defend share in their core markets. But Optimal’s TrueTAM analysis suggests AI makes it harder, not easier, for vertical SaaS leaders to expand beyond their core.

Expansion beyond the model API layer (Figure 5 of 27 figures in the attached 22 page report)

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