Matthew Prince has a way of explaining technological shifts that makes the scale of change immediately clear. Speaking with Rapid Response host Bob Safian at SXSW this weekend, the co-founder of Cloudflare described the AI transition in blunt operational terms, likening the mass commercial availability of LLMs to electric screwdrivers. “Somewhere around November (2025),” he said, “the electric screwdrivers got really good.”
The metaphor reflects what is happening inside companies across industries. Teams built their workflows around processes done by people: writing code line by line, summarizing documents, compiling research, or moving data across systems. People were all we had. AI systems accelerate those tasks dramatically. Prince described the resulting divide clearly. “We have people who are a hundred times more productive than they were before,” he said. “And we have another camp that still wants to use the manual screwdriver.”
Data emerging across the technology economy shows the same pattern of acceleration. Researchers at Microsoft, studying nearly 5,000 developers, found that engineers using AI assistants completed about 26% more tasks than their peers without them. Productivity gains vary across roles and organizations, but the trend is unmistakable: AI multiplies human output.
What this means for management, any management, is clear. “You can’t have a world where one employee is dramatically more productive than another,” he said. “If two employees make the same salary and one produces dramatically more output, the organization resolves that difference.”
At the same time, the internet itself is transforming under the same forces. The web once functioned as a place where humans navigated pages and followed links. Increasingly, software agents perform that navigation instead.
It Is an Internet of AIs Now
Network-level data reveals how dramatic that shift has become. Automated systems now generate more than half of global internet traffic. Security firm Imperva estimates bots accounted for 51% of all web traffic in 2024, the first time automated activity surpassed human browsing in a decade. Of that traffic, 37% came from malicious or exploitative bots that scrape data, probe system vulnerabilities, or simply launch attacks.
Cloudflare’s own network measurements reinforce the trend. Non-AI bots alone generated roughly half of requests to HTML pages across the company’s infrastructure, at times exceeding human traffic by as much as 25 percentage points.
The web is no longer a network for people; it is a network of AIs that work for people. (For now.) That change is fundamentally disrupting the attention economy that has powered the Internet for the last 25 years. Publishers created content, Google indexed it, and traffic flowed back to the source. From there, publishers could sell ads, subscriptions, or stuff.
Large language models break the loop. Instead of clicking through multiple articles to answer a question, users increasingly receive synthesized responses directly from AI. Prince explains: “The business model of the internet was to generate content, drive traffic, sell ads,” he said. “AI breaks that.”
Evidence of the disruption already appears in traffic data. Google still dominates referrals across the open web, generating about 63% of traffic referrals among major websites. But the volume is plummeting.
A 2026 survey of publishers found that news organizations expect search-referral traffic to decline by 43% over the next three years, with some anticipating losses exceeding 75%.
In some cases, the change already looks dramatic. Analysis of several large technology publications found referral traffic from Google dropped sharply after the rollout of AI-generated summaries, with some outlets losing the majority of their search-driven visits.
Meanwhile, the broader journalism industry is undergoing a painful contraction. The media sector eliminated more than 21,400 jobs in 2023, the largest wave of layoffs since the 2008 financial crisis. The trend continued through 2025, when U.S. media companies cut more than17,000 additional positions amid declining advertising revenue and structural change across the digital ecosystem.
Whoever Has the Most Data Wins
The technological forces driving those changes extend beyond the traffic pipeline itself. Even search engines capture only a portion of the information available online. Estimates suggest Google indexes roughly 15-20% of the web’s content, leaving the majority of information behind authentication systems, paywalls, private databases, or dynamic services that traditional crawlers cannot easily reach.
Prince believes that scarcity within that information landscape will shape the economics of the AI era. “The thing that will differentiate AI companies over time,” he said, “is who has access to unique data.”
The implication extends beyond technology companies to the entire knowledge economy. Original reporting, proprietary datasets, specialized expertise, and local information serve as valuable inputs for AI systems seeking to produce accurate answers.
A hyperlocal newsroom in a mountain town, for example, may hold the only current information about restaurants, weather patterns, zoning decisions, or public safety developments. (Prince ought to know; he owns The Park Record in Park City, Utah.) Licensing that information could create a viable revenue stream for local publishers.
Prince sees that shift as an opportunity rather than a collapse. “What wins in the future,” he said, “is who furthers human knowledge.”
Prince frames the stakes in ambitious terms. “You, as an individual, can build something that changes the world,” he said. “The ability to do heroic things has never been greater.”
The electric screwdriver has arrived. The organizations, creators, and journalists who learn to use it effectively will shape the future of the internet.
Those that resist? They may be screwing themselves.
