The Wall Street Journal published a post on July 29, reporting that in the AI era, one person running an entire company with annual revenue exceeding $1 million is no longer a far-fetched idea, and the market is entering the “era of solopreneurs.”
The report cited estimates from payment service provider Stripe, which showed that in 2023, approximately 4 million Americans relied on self-employment as their primary source of income and had annual sales exceeding $100,000—nearly double the approximately 2 million people who met the same criteria in the early 2010s.
The report also noted that the number of one-person businesses with annual sales exceeding $1 million in 2025 was approximately twice the number in 2023. Meanwhile, the number of self-employed individuals with sales exceeding $5 million and $10 million was approximately three times higher in 2025 than in 2023.
If the 2019 figure is set at “1,” from 2023 to 2025, the index for the proportion of businesses with annual sales exceeding $5 million rose from approximately 2.5 to approximately 5.3; the index for businesses exceeding $10 million rose from approximately 2.5 to approximately 4.8.
Regarding the driving forces behind this trend, the report believes there is a clear connection to artificial intelligence (AI). Stripe also compared AI adoption rates across industries with the growth rate of new business applications, finding that industries with higher AI adoption rates generally saw faster growth in the number of new business applications.
However, there were exceptions among industries: Manufacturing had a relatively high AI adoption rate, but the increase in applications was lower than expected; the increase in applications in transportation and warehousing was higher than expected.
