Azeem Azhar

We talk about 800 million people using ChatGPT.

We talk about a couple of billion using these chatbots.

globally.

But are we using them the way that we've used other technologies when we talk about them being deployed, like the flush toilet or electricity?

Is it really use of one of these technologies if you just put the odd query into it rather than Google, but your life remains largely the same?

I mean, it's almost trivially easy to put a product in the hands of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people because of the App Store, because of iPhones.

And perhaps when we think about where we are in absorption, we need to go beyond someone downloaded the app and played with it a little bit.

And I'm sure within those 2 billion people, there are many people like me for whom our ways of working and ways of living have changed because of these tools.

But we need to be a little bit thoughtful about that.

And that also, I think, reflects back on companies.

Companies have a lot to do when they want to transform their businesses.

API access is the easy bit.

It's the institutional metabolism that is quite hard, very hard in some cases.

That's why you hear stories of, and I speak to bosses a lot of the time, they're very happy largely with how their AI deployments are going, but they also recognize that really deep and meaningful change is going to take quite a lot of time.

Now, I don't think this is going to be a multi-multi-decade process that it was with

electricity.

I just think companies are more adaptable, people understand the technology better.

We've spent years thinking about how to manage large-scale change, that horrible management consultancy word, transformation.

And firm appetite is very, very clear.

And the adoption will get easier now that there are standard operating procedures, there are playbooks over the last couple of years that at least the leading firms have developed.