Liz’s view
The AI boom will have winners and losers. That much is obvious, but if it needed saying, David Solomon, Larry Fink, and Ray Dalio have all said it.
The problem, as gargantuan sums of money go into funding the race, is that everyone thinks they’ll be winners. From call centers to online tutors to corporate consultants, each sector plans to ride the AI wave to end up on top — even if their business models are obviously vulnerable to being undone by it. So does Expedia, never mind the autonomous agents who will soon crawl airline and hotel offerings without anyone opening a browser.
“Ultimately, travelers are looking for a trusted place or a trusted partner,” CEO Ariane Gorin told Semafor last week. Maybe she’s right, but that’s what travel agents — who also believed they were brewing an irreplaceable blend of humanity and technology — said right before Expedia put them out of business.
AI is a technological Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average. “Every company that we talk about investing in or lending to — it’s amazing, AI is good for everybody,” Mike Koester, managing partner of private-credit firm 5C, tells me.
Optimism is the secret sauce of American businesses and the vibrant capital markets that sustain them. Europeans seem to dream smaller, figuring they’ll be constrained by borders and the risk-averse banks they are so dreadfully reliant on. “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” is an apocryphal quote paraphrased from John Steinbeck that helps explain why it’s hard for Washington to raise taxes on rich people. Everyone thinks they’ll be one someday.
On the cusp of an AI boom, every CEO is a temporarily embarrassed billionaire, believing they will harness the best of AI and be immune from its worst — at least as long as they can lay off enough workers to stay ahead of the cost curve.
Room for Disagreement
David Friedberg, co-host of the All In podcast said everyone out there thinks “there’s a winner and everyone else is a loser... But this is an entirely new world that’s going to be a lot bigger than the world we had last year. And everyone’s building down their own path.”