Yes, AI is real. Yes, it matters. And yes, after 25 years of running companies through one tech revolution after another, I’m exhausted by the way we’re talking about it.
The way AI is being talked about today — especially in boardrooms, investor decks, and venture capital echo chambers — has stopped being thoughtful and started being hysterical. And candidly, in my day-to-day work running a fintech company, the hysteria simply doesn’t square with the reality.
I’ve lived through all of it: the internet, mobile, crypto, blockchain, cloud computing. All of them mattered. None of them mattered in the same way — and that distinction is exactly what today’s AI conversation keeps getting wrong.
The question I find most clarifying is this: “For a given company or business: Is AI more like the internet — or more like cloud computing?”
The internet changed how we live, communicate, and do business. Companies had to reinvent themselves to survive. Cloud computing was also a massive technological shift, one that created trillions of dollars in market capitalization for its providers. But for many operating businesses, it didn’t radically change what they did, — just how efficiently they did it.
