Azeem Azhar

But my sense will be that AI's biggest gains will be a system-wide improvement, a system-wide option value.

It is an exponential gap.

The institutions of finance are not particularly suited to the dynamics of this particular technology.

And it's really not because

The participants are confused and are not brilliant and smart and diligent.

It's because of the nature of those exponential processes and how they're actually hard to rationalize in the linear spreadsheets around which decisions are made.

So this feels exceptional, but the pattern is familiar.

For a decade, I've been arguing that exponential technologies behave in this way, and it's playing out precisely in front of our eyes.

They accelerate quickly.

They create an exponential gap because those technologies move quickly.

We adopt them quickly, and our institutions, norms, and other systems, for many good reasons, move slowly.

These technologies create new behaviors.

They can expand markets.

And you can see that in the way people, all of us, use these tools in ways that were unimaginable two years ago, perhaps even just a year ago.

So this is why a historical lens matters.

And my framework for the exponential age helps make sense of this moment of chat GPT turning three.

The speed and the scale might feel disorienting, but there are those common features in this underlying dynamic.

Today, I want to speak about how AI is creating a kind of split reality, a split reality around productivity.

It seems to be creating, increasing and improving productivity at the individual level, but how much is it impacting firms and the wider economy yet?

Now, do stay to the end because there is a surprising bit of data that throws more light, perhaps more confusion on all of this.