Azeem Azhar

And yet we know from surveys, Edelman Trust Barometer being one that I use as a barometer, frankly, showing that roughly 70 to 75% of Americans are pessimistic about what AI might bring to them while they even use the tools.

It's almost like you're forced to use them somehow because you need to participate.

It's an uncomfortable place to be.

And I think that that problem is going to become more and more acute.

We're already starting to see resistance in the US to the build-out of data centers.

There's an analyst pressure group that tracks this, and they had identified 142 data center projects of total value over $64 billion stopped in the US since 2023, whether that was happening in Virginia or the Midwest or Pennsylvania or the South.

These groups are organizing and trying to resist the build-out of this infrastructure.

And it's fanatically bipartisan.

So you've got traditional landowners and rural communities connecting up with environmentalists to ensure that the I's get dotted and the T's get crossed, but also at some point that you can resist the build-out of this.

And that, to me, is going to be a really interesting and important tension that will grow over the next year or two.

It does introduce the idea of a legitimacy crunch and how AI companies need to talk about what it is they're doing, which I think they're going to have to do over the next year.

You're talking about replacing every job, talking about

scientists in a data center thinking up everything, it may not be the messaging that is going to be appealing to anyone.

It also may not be how we think about this technology in the most sort of human beneficent type of way.

Okay, so that's what we've got to.

This is what I think was important to think about over the next couple of years.

And the models aren't the bottleneck.

There's these series of absorption challenges.

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