At a time when corporate CEOs are largely saying that they can't see that AI has improved office productivity at all, why should we believe that a killer productivity application of genai that's amazing enough to justify an order of magnitude increase in enterprise spending on productivity tools is just around the corner?
I think CEOs could honestly say it a year ago, but by now the numbers of those who say so should be dwindling.
Recent surveys by BCG and others suggest things have changed.
Personally, I know many people in different fields who’ve seen crazy speed ups in many of their tasks.
I'm using claude to make gaming mod apps I never would have bothered to code before, but they have zero monetizable value. There is demand for sure, but somewhat ironically, copyright/IP/TOS law stands in the way. The thing which committed the biggest copyright infringement in human history lets me make another thing which I can't release because of copyright law. I'd get cease-and-desisted instantly if I did so.
Many here are idiotic. Economic growth is measured via monetisation of output - not what you think is of value to you.
And employees self-reporting that they saved time doesn't necessarily mean they actually save time. Humans are famously crap at estimating that sort of thing.
Anecdotally, I've seen management using AI to produce more and more flashy looking dashboards and interactive displays of various metrics. Will this help our bottom line?
I see how useful AI tools are for myself and can't imagine it not changing the world over the next few decades.
If not then a) don’t diss the mba folks b) you don’t have as much conviction as you claim c) if you are then send a link so I can review?
Cheers
There is also the question of time scale. Growing a market takes time. Assuming the numbers above are the right order of magnitude, we are not going from 0.1 to 1 in a year. So even if the number would make sense over longer time frames, it can still be unsustainable for a significant amount of time before that.
Like the Internet at the end if the 1990s, basically.
But also the car business is far larger than the horse business ever was. It is not zero-sum; every time Henry Ford's factory spit out a new model T, real wealth was being created.
Money is just a standin for wealth. If we suddenly doubled the amount of wealth in the world, we could just print more dollars to match - or the existing dollars would just become worth twice as much.
For example, if I'm a landlord that uses AI to more intelligently price rental increases to maximize profit without attrition, I have created more revenue but not more wealth.
Play positive sum games.
That said, this came too late for investors in the dot-com boom. AI investors may find themselves in a similar situation.
Without smartphone, cellular networks etc you’d be miles off. Nobody had this in their thesis so they were plain wrong.