Azeem Azhar

This is a thought experiment.

Some of the major investment banks actually project

that $1 trillion level of spend within five years.

Now, look, that sounds like an astonishing number.

It's almost like Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers film, you know, $1 trillion, although he was three orders of magnitude lower than that.

But let's see where we are today.

Roughly 9% of American firms claim to have a scale AI project up and running and delivering results.

Now that 9% may seem low to you, but it's very quick compared to what happened with the transition from co-located servers to the cloud.

To get to about 9% of firms was perhaps seven to nine years.

It was even quicker than the rate at which enterprises moved from non-smartphones to iPhones, which was probably a two to three year, maybe three to four year process.

And that 9% is a small portion.

That's going to become 95%, maybe 100% within a few years.

And on top of that, we're going to go from single use cases in companies to dozens or hundreds.

And if agents start to become reliable, agents churning over more and more use of these systems.

And it's not just the US, of course.

Every other company around the world needs to think about how they're going to implement AI.

It's not, of course, just about enterprises.

It's also about consumers.

Today, we're at 700 million active users on ChatGPT.

That number has lots of room to grow.