This of course hinges on the big if: does AI create wealth? I think yes, but maybe not $6 trillion of it in five years.
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.
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?
AI made it worse because LLMs will instantly give a confidently wrong answer where previously that moment of uncertainty might have led to a conversation with the data’s custodian.
Lots of code gets written, that much is certain. A lot of slopped out PowerPoint presentations which are just worse to read than human-written ones. We have _not_ magically accelerated delivery times and the product which is 99% vibe-coded perpetually has “oh that’s weird” bugs. An obscene amount of effort is being poured into internal tooling, 90% of which is reinventing existing tooling. Important to note that the internal tooling isn’t actually usable or helpful in building the product, but we are pouring eye watering amounts of cash into it.
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.
https://www.bcg.com/press/3june2026-ai-reshaping-jobs-faster...
You also have to be careful about the Hawthorne Effect. It's quite common for workplace interventions to produce improved productivity measures that are illusory or fleeting because what workers are really responding to is the novelty of the change or the simple fact that they know they're being observed.
Which doesn't necessarily mean that the benefits people are seeing right now aren't real. Just that, again, it may not translate to a sustained financial benefit that would justify a meaningful contribution to a global $6T/year rate of AI spending.
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.
Management doesn’t see the problem because they are still completely distracted trying to measure dev team productivity in story points or KLOC instead of something meaningful like USD.
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
Simply holding an overrated degree doesn’t instantly guarantee that their opinions and skills are “worthwhile” or “good”.
GenAI is difficult to monetize.
Two things can be true at the same time.
For example, I helped build a specialized GenAI product that disrupted its niche and unseated the incumbent market leader. It was also, as of when I left the company earlier this year, losing money hand over fist.
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.
But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.
Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.
But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.
Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.