Happy birthday to ChatGPT, the only technology in history that plumbers figured out before Fortune 500 companies did.
Three years in, and some guy named Dave in a work truck in Tulsa is using AI to diagnose a seized pump, generate an invoice, and send a follow-up email, all before lunch. Meanwhile, Oracle's bonds are down 8% because Wall Street can't decide if the cloud business is building the future or just a very expensive way to heat Northern Virginia.
Dave doesn't have a Chief AI Officer. Dave doesn't have a "Center of Excellence." Dave doesn't have a 47-slide deck on "Agentic Workflow Integration" or a consultant named Brandon explaining that transformation requires "alignment across the leadership matrix." Dave has a phone, a subscription, and a customer whose basement is flooding. The ROI calculates itself.
The corporate problem isn't the technology. It's that nobody can deploy a chatbot without first redesigning seventeen legacy processes, scheduling a steering committee, and filing an environmental impact statement on the disruption to middle management. By the time the procurement team approves the pilot program, Dave has diagnosed six water heaters and taken his kid to baseball practice.
This is the exponential gap in action: the distance between what the technology can do and what institutions allow it to do. Same reason it takes the Pentagon four years to buy a toilet seat. The tools are one click away. The spaghetti is forever.
Fastest technology adoption in human history, and the plumbers are winning. Not because they're smarter. Because nobody made them fill out the form.
I really liked the point that traditional capital markets aren’t well suited to exponential-age disruption. When value chains change so quickly and unpredictably, traditional capital-allocation processes are simply too slow.
Does that mean angels and VCs should end up with an even larger share of overall tech investment?
On the other hand, the faster you’re forced to allocate capital, the higher the risk of losing it entirely …
Happy birthday to ChatGPT, the only technology in history that plumbers figured out before Fortune 500 companies did.
Three years in, and some guy named Dave in a work truck in Tulsa is using AI to diagnose a seized pump, generate an invoice, and send a follow-up email, all before lunch. Meanwhile, Oracle's bonds are down 8% because Wall Street can't decide if the cloud business is building the future or just a very expensive way to heat Northern Virginia.
Dave doesn't have a Chief AI Officer. Dave doesn't have a "Center of Excellence." Dave doesn't have a 47-slide deck on "Agentic Workflow Integration" or a consultant named Brandon explaining that transformation requires "alignment across the leadership matrix." Dave has a phone, a subscription, and a customer whose basement is flooding. The ROI calculates itself.
The corporate problem isn't the technology. It's that nobody can deploy a chatbot without first redesigning seventeen legacy processes, scheduling a steering committee, and filing an environmental impact statement on the disruption to middle management. By the time the procurement team approves the pilot program, Dave has diagnosed six water heaters and taken his kid to baseball practice.
This is the exponential gap in action: the distance between what the technology can do and what institutions allow it to do. Same reason it takes the Pentagon four years to buy a toilet seat. The tools are one click away. The spaghetti is forever.
Fastest technology adoption in human history, and the plumbers are winning. Not because they're smarter. Because nobody made them fill out the form.
Hi Azeem, great post.
I really liked the point that traditional capital markets aren’t well suited to exponential-age disruption. When value chains change so quickly and unpredictably, traditional capital-allocation processes are simply too slow.
Does that mean angels and VCs should end up with an even larger share of overall tech investment?
On the other hand, the faster you’re forced to allocate capital, the higher the risk of losing it entirely …