Yes, AI is real. Yes, it matters. And yes, after 25 years of leading companies through one technological revolution after another, I’m exhausted by the way we’re talking about this.
The way we talk about AI today — especially in boardrooms, investor presentations, and venture capital bubbles — has gone from thoughtful to hysterical. And, frankly, in my day-to-day life leading a financial technology company, this hysteria simply doesn’t match reality.
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I’ve lived through it all: the internet, mobile devices, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, cloud computing. They all mattered. None of them mattered in the same way — and it is precisely this distinction that the current conversation about AI continues to get wrong.
The question I find most enlightening is this: “For a given company or business: Is AI more like the internet — or more like cloud computing?”
The internet has changed the way we live, communicate and do business. Companies had to reinvent themselves to survive.
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Cloud computing was also a massive technological shift that generated trillions of dollars in market value for its providers. But for many operating companies, it didn’t radically change what they did—just how efficiently they did it.
I have led companies on both sides of this transition. Before the cloud, we rented space in hosting centers, purchased hardware, and operated 24/7 network control centers. It worked.
When I founded Capitolis, the cloud was mature and available. It has made expansion easier and more cost-effective, but the underlying business model has not changed. This type of decision rarely falls to the CEO or the board. It is a decision made by the engineering leader together with the CFO and COO: What is the return? What is the counterpart?
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This is exactly how many companies should be approaching AI right now.
AI’s reality check
There are businesses that will be completely transformed — or destroyed — by AI. I recently had a DoorDash customer service interaction that appeared to be driven by AI. It was fast, accurate and better than the service provided by most human-staffed call centers.
For companies of this type, the talk may, in fact, fall short of reality. But this is not universal.
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At Capitolis, we are a highly integrated corporate network, embedded in the institutional financial world. We won’t be affected by AI anytime soon. We are investing in AI — hundreds of thousands of dollars a year — and implementing it across the organization. We see pockets of efficiency. But we have not yet seen the returns on this investment.
In engineering, we see virtual assistants writing code and we believe we can achieve something like a 25% productivity gain over time. With around 100 developers, this is significant.
But the tough questions still apply: How important is this over other competing demands? How long will it take and at what cost? What will be postponed?
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When you look at the real return on investment, the scenario is one of caution. Much of what many companies are spending on AI now is exploratory, not transformative. That’s okay—as long as we’re honest about it.
Noise is the problem
If you listen to the loudest voices in the market, you’ll think every company is on the brink of existential failure if it doesn’t reorganize around AI immediately.
Every conference, every business proposal, every debate — that’s the only topic people seem capable of discussing. This approach is wrong and potentially harmful.
Some companies focused purely on AI bring genuine promises and will bring returns to their investors. But that doesn’t mean every operating company should act as if AI is a devastating threat.
For many healthy, profitable, and fast-growing businesses, AI will look a lot more like cloud computing: a powerful efficiency tool, not a business model rewrite.
Make independent decisions based on return on investment. Ignore the noise. Treating AI as a devastating existential threat is not a strategy. What we need is less talk and more discipline. AI deserves seriousness. Not hysteria.
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