It’s Not About the Chatbots, Darling
Let’s be honest, the public obsession with artificial intelligence has become a bit of a circus. Everyone and their dog is asking a chatbot to write a poem or create a picture of a cat riding a unicorn. It’s a fun distraction, I suppose. But while the world is mesmerised by these digital toys, the real, grown-up money is moving somewhere else entirely. It’s flowing into the decidedly less glamorous, but infinitely more lucrative, world of enterprise AI.
I’ve seen these technology cycles before. There’s the initial flash of excitement, the public frenzy, and then the slow, grinding realisation of where the actual value lies. This time, it seems to be happening much faster. Just look at Accenture, the sort of consulting firm that corporations pay a fortune to tell them what they already know. They recently reported a staggering $1.5 billion in new generative AI bookings. In a single quarter. That isn't speculative froth. That’s the sound of the world’s biggest companies opening their wallets, signalling a shift that’s less of a trend and more of a tectonic plate moving under our feet.