Tom Gardner

while spending tens of billions of dollars in CapEx.

So the drive to AI compute is a much more aggressive spend in society than the drive for employment.

And we're just seeing that rippling in the white collar market right now and in large tech.

But what's going to happen with the impact across the marketplace as this spreads out across every industry?

And we see that AI tooling really does drive greater productivity gains, will deliver higher gross margins, higher operating margins, higher returns on capital for a lot of businesses.

But the question is, what will happen to the labor markets with all of these automations?

We're all asking this question.

It's showing up in the sentiment studies now by the University of Michigan.

And so consumer confidence is at historic lows.

And I would just say that we're in the zone today where we're getting almost true Pareto principle on spending, where 20% of households are spending and are controlling 80% of the wealth in the US.

And my concern is what happens if the labor market begins to fall, because we obviously still have persistent inflation, a number of other gas prices on the rise with the conflict in Iran.

The question that I ask is, what happens to the consumer that is driving 70% of U.S.

GDP historically?

I think these confidence numbers out of the University of Michigan are pretty concerning.

Well, I think we always have to put things in the context of valuation.

So we have to remember in some areas where there are declines or flattening out, maybe the valuations have moved below

those realities, and now there's going to be a long-term opportunity to invest.

But I would say that what we're looking at today is an enterprise world, that the safest places to invest right now are in the CapEx boom, the AI infrastructure boom.

Valuations are rich, but demand is unlimited.

So I would be looking at the infrastructure build-out, B2B spending, enterprise-driven revenue,