Calling this an “AI bubble” reads like pure sour grapes from folks who missed the adoption curve. Real teams are already banking gains - code velocity up, ticket resolution times down, and marketing lift from AI-assisted creative while capex always precedes revenue in platform shifts (see cloud 2010, smartphones 2007). The “costs don’t match cash flow” trope ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles and the rapid glide path of unit economics as models, inference, and hardware efficiency improve. Habit formation is the moat: once workers rely on AI copilots, those workflows harden into paid seats and platform lock-in. We’re not watching a bubble pop; we’re watching infrastructure being laid for the next decade of products.
Things can be a bubble AND actual economic growth long term. Happens all the time with new tech.
Dotcom boom made all kinds of predictions about Web usage. That decade plus later turned out to be true. But at the time the companies got way ahead of consumer adoption.
Specific to AI copilots. We currently are building hundreds that nobody will use for every one success.
All the same arguments could be used for dot-com bubble. It was a boom and a bubble at the same time. When it popped, only the real stuff remained. Same will happen to AI. What you are describing are good use cases - there are 99 other companies doing 99 other useless things with no cost / cash flow match.
> Calling this an “AI bubble” reads like pure sour grapes from folks who missed the adoption curve.
Ad hominem.
> ignores lagging enterprise procurement cycles
Time is long gone for that, even for most bureaucratic orgs.
> rapid glide path of unit economics as models, inference, and hardware efficiency improve
Conjecture. We don't know if we can scale up effectively. We are hitting limits of technology and energy already
> Habit formation is the moat
Yes and no. GenAI tools are useful if done right, but they have not been what they were made out to be, and they do not seem to be getting better as quickly as I like. The most useful tool so far is copilot auto-complete, but its value is limited for experienced devs. If its price increased 10x tomorow, I would cancel our subscription.
> We’re not watching a bubble pop; we’re watching infrastructure being laid for the next decade of products.
How much money are you risking right now? Or is it different this time?
