While casually browsing Reddit, this phrase caught my attention, and I thought I’d share my experience about it. A few months now into building Fabeo (and the AdBytes Studio), I noticed something I didn’t expect going in: customers weren’t just using AI video to make ads. They were using it to see an idea before committing real money to it. That shift has turned out to be one of the more genuinely useful things we’ve watched happen on our platform.
A few examples that stuck with me.
The drone-in-paddy-fields pitch
One customer came to us with a genuinely futuristic idea — using drones to optimize different stages of paddy cultivation: seeding, spraying, monitoring crop health from the air. Brilliant concept. The problem was equally obvious: how do you pitch investors or early customers on drones flying over rice paddies when the actual hardware, the actual field deployment, doesn’t exist yet?
Instead of waiting to build a prototype and film it in an actual field — months of work, real cost, real risk of it not landing — they used AI video to simulate exactly what the finished system would look like in action. Drones gliding over paddy fields, the stages of cultivation it would optimize, the outcome it promised. Not a mockup slide deck. A video that let people see the idea working before a single drone had flown.
That’s the part that struck me: the pitch stopped being “trust me, this will work” and became “here’s what it looks like when it does.”
The jewellery brand that needed to explain where it came from
A different kind of customer, a jewellery brand, had a different problem. Their challenge wasn’t showing a future product — it was communicating why their brand and logo exist the way they do. Every brand has an origin story, a reason the mark on the box means something. Most of the time, that story lives in a founder’s head, or a paragraph on an “About Us” page nobody reads.
They used AI video to actually tell that story — the thinking behind the brand identity, the meaning behind the logo, made visual and watchable instead of buried in text. It’s a small thing, but it changed how customers engaged with the brand from the very first video, not three purchases in.
The pattern across 30+ businesses
Here’s what surprised me most: across more than 30 businesses we’ve worked with, the very first thing most of them chose to make wasn’t a flashy ad campaign. It was a product or service explainer video — the simplest, most direct use of AI video there is. Before running paid campaigns, before scaling content, they wanted one clear video that explained what they actually do.
That’s not a small insight. It tells you that the real first bottleneck for most businesses isn’t creative polish — it’s just being able to explain the idea clearly, fast, and cheaply enough to test whether it lands before spending real budget finding out.
Why this matters more than the video itself?
None of this is really about video quality. It’s about compressing the distance between having an idea and being able to show it to someone else. Traditionally, that distance was expensive: a prototype, a shoot, a production timeline, real capital at risk before you knew if the idea resonated. AI video collapses that gap to days, sometimes hours.
For the drone-in-paddy-fields founder, that meant pitching a hardware idea before the hardware existed. For the jewellery brand, it meant making an abstract brand story tangible. For 30+ other businesses, it meant just being understood, clearly, from day one.
That’s the real reason I’d call using AI to simulate business ideas one of the best decisions — not ours specifically, but the businesses we’ve watched do it. It’s not replacing the hard work of actually building the thing. It’s just no longer forcing you to build it blind before anyone can tell you whether it’s worth building at all.