picks and shovels
picks and shovels noun: the crucial tools or ingredients for a booming industry or enterprise.
Noun
picks and shovels pl (plural only)
- The crucial tools or ingredients for a booming industry or enterprise.
- By offering advanced AI capabilities, bridging proprietary and public models, providing secure storage solutions and delivering generative AI services, these providers of "picks and shovels" stand to play instrumental roles in shaping the future of enterprise AI.2023 June 26, Steven Dickens, “The Picks And Shovels Of The AI Gold Rush”, in Forbes, archived from the original on 27 Jun 2023
- They’re sort of a classic picks and shovels company that is making money by building the inputs to AI, but not actually training their own frontier models.2025 June 13, Kevin Roose, Casey Newton, “Meta Bets on Scale + Apple’s A.I. Struggles + Listeners on Job Automation”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
Origin of picks and shovels
From the expression “When everybody is digging for gold, it's good to be in the pick and shovel business” or a variation thereof.
Questions about picks and shovels
- What does picks and shovels mean?
- Picks and shovels means the crucial tools or ingredients for a booming industry or enterprise.
- What part of speech is picks and shovels?
- Picks and shovels is a noun.
Words near picks and shovels in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: picks and shovels (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “picks and shovels.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/picks_and_shovels. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.