Azeem Azhar

And I'll start by telling you a story.

So back in 97, 98, I was building internet companies.

And one of the companies that I invested in was a realtor, online realtor in France.

Of course, online real estate is a huge business now, right?

You have Zillow and Redfin and a whole bunch of others.

When we got into that market, not only did only 4% or 5% of French people have internet access, they were still largely on the Minitel system, but that 5% wasn't far advanced in other parts of Western Europe.

None of the realtors had PCs.

And so when we went off to, or the founders went off to win business, they had to buy PCs for the realtors, train them on how to get onto the internet and how to upload their images and their inventory.

I mean, it was a complete nightmare.

The difference today is that every company or the large proportion of companies, particularly big ones,

are sitting on a digital stack, which they've built over 20 years.

All those billions of fees they paid to Accenture and PwC and SAP to do digital transformations means they've got a digital infrastructure.

And today it takes...

A single decision in Microsoft headquarters to put an AI tool into every copy of Microsoft Excel because it's all run on the cloud.

And that feels really different to 99.

It feels like there's a whole set of hurdles that now don't exist that would allow a much more rapid deployment.

And with rapid deployment should come much faster increase in revenues.

Yeah, I feel that's right.

Gemini from Google and Microsoft are all doing reasonable well.

I mean, we do have the new players, but what's interesting about the configuration of the market is that each of the new players like OpenAI and Anthropic and others are really closely embedded with the last generation's giants.