San Francisco entrepreneur Ira Bodnar said Anthropic’s Claude update, which introduced a Meta ads connector, slashed her startup Ryze AI’s deal close rate from 70% to 20%. The ad-management platform quickly pivoted to agency-focused workflows, as Bodnar warned other founders that similar AI disruptions could hit overnight.

San Francisco entrepreneur Ira Bodnar's ad-management platform Ryze went from a 70 percent deal close rate to a pivot in weeks - and she's warning other founders that the same could happen to them. Bodnar says that she woke up one morning to something far more unsettling - her entire business category had been rendered redundant overnight by a single update from Anthropic.

"I woke up today and Claude killed my startup," she wrote in a post on X. Bodnar is the founder of Ryze AI, a San Francisco-based startup that had built a tool allowing businesses to hand over control of their Google and Meta advertising accounts to an AI that would manage the campaigns automatically.

Ryze rose to success pretty fast

By most startup metrics, Ryze was a genuine success story. The company landed hundreds of customers in just two months with a 70 percent deal close rate - numbers that would make most founders envious. The product worked, customers were paying, and growth was accelerating.

Then Anthropic's Claude launched a Meta ads connector, and everything changed. After Claude and Manus introduced a Meta ads feature, Ryze's deal close rate collapsed to 20 percent. Potential customers now had a reason to pause. Why pay for a dedicated tool when a general-purpose AI they were already using could start doing something similar for free?

"What we are building now seems meaningless"

Bodnar was candid about the existential weight of the moment. "Claude still cannot make changes in ad accounts and can only do analysis. It also has no access to Google Ads. But it will be possible within a few months," she wrote. "What we are building now seems meaningless."

The acknowledgment is striking for its honesty. Rather than pretend the threat was distant or overstated, Bodnar stared directly at the trajectory and made her calculations accordingly.

Bodnar has already pivoted to the next thing

Notably, Bodnar had seen the storm coming before it hit. Anticipating the disruption, Ryze shifted focus weeks ago to help agencies manage complex ad workflows across hundreds of accounts with small teams. The new positioning targets a layer of complexity that Claude doesn't yet touch - multi-account, multi-client management at scale for professional agencies.

"Our business will be fine. We knew this was coming and we moved early," she said, remaining upbeat about the pivot.

What will survive and what won't

Beyond her own company's story, Bodnar offered a broader analysis of which product categories are safe in the age of aggressive AI expansion - and which are already on borrowed time.

CRM platforms, she argues, are holding up for now. "Claude does not store customer data. The same goes for lead databases such as Clay, Apollo and RB2B," she noted.

But the outlook for outreach tools is bleak. Outreach automation and outreach infrastructure - tools that help users make first contact with potential customers - are expected to disappear soon. "If you tell AI, 'Send an email about my service to all YC founders,' it just executes," she warned. "The day is not far off when agents buy domains and set up automation on their own."

Ad creative tools face a similar fate. "Within a few months, Meta and Google will generate creatives directly inside ad accounts. Some high-quality services for large advertisers will survive, but platforms for small and medium-sized businesses will be absorbed and integrated into platforms," she predicted.

MCP: The new App Store nobody is talking about

One of Bodnar's most provocative observations concerns Model Context Protocol, or MCP - the system that allows AI models like Claude to connect with and control external tools and services.

She argues that MCP is poised to become a new kind of app store, with a critical difference from the ones we know. "If Claude selects tools through MCP, users do not even get a chance to compare alternatives," she warned. In the current app economy, users browse, compare, and choose. In an MCP-dominated world, the AI picks the tool - and the user never sees the alternatives. The implications for startup distribution are profound.