Kai Ryssdal

That's what I'm saying.

We walked into an office with a fish tank in the lobby, and we met Sudheesh Nair, the co-founder and CEO of TinyFish.

Hi, I'm Kai.

The company's about a year and a half old and trying to fill a very particular niche in the AI economy.

Let's go show.

Software is really hard to do on the radio, but we're going to try.

Sudheesh walked us past a dozen or so people coding away on their computers.

It has a very tech startup-y vibe.

And he grabbed a laptop with a hotel booking site pulled up.

Google Hotels is our customer.

So far, we've been talking about the physical infrastructure behind AI, data centers and networking technology and power plants.

This company makes software infrastructure for sites like Google Hotels and Expedia, which pull live pricing information from hotel websites.

All the tiny fish, if you will, the small hotels that don't have as much technological know-how as the Hilton's and the Hyatt's of the world.

They don't have APIs.

They don't have access.

And the more AI gets integrated into the web, the harder it's going to be for those little fish to be seen when you go searching for a hotel.

Availability and pricing information for places like that sometimes doesn't show up on the big hotel aggregator sites because their websites just aren't sophisticated enough.

Tiny Fish is trying to solve that problem with AI software that can pull information from anywhere, even from a PDF on the underpowered website of a tiny Japanese hotel.

The bet that investors are making in startups like Tiny Fish and thousands of others is that even if you don't necessarily know you're using AI when you're booking a hotel or making a doctor's appointment, AI software is going to be working for you behind the scenes.

Which, fine, a new cancer drug would be great, but the trade-off between a new medicine that saves lives years from now and the very real cost of your power bill going up right now is a tough sell.