Amy Webb was on her long Sunday bike ride, the one she takes when she’s not training for a race, when the thought arrived fully formed. As she posted on LinkedIn recently: every CEO she talks to is buying abundance, and none are budgeting for the cost of abundance. And she talks to CEOs every day for a living.
Webb, 51, runs the Future Today Strategy Group, the foresight and consulting firm she founded in 2006 after a career in data journalism that led to her subsequent interest in machine learning. Webb, who also teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business, published The Big Nine, which named nine American and Chinese tech giants as forces that would dominate in a world marked by artificial intelligence and a full-scale tech cold war, so she’s used to being ahead of her time, and she’s used to being frustrated by the world being behind the schedule she sees in her head.
So when Webb told Fortune that she sees something like a bust coming for corporate AI spending, it’s worth pausing on the precise dynamic she’s describing. “AI is making production cheap,” she said, “but it’s making everything else in companies much more expensive.” The corporate world, she added, is going through something like what millennials and Gen Zers experienced as dating-app fatigue.
