AI Impact Curve: Which way is that sucker going to go?
The future. Always a tricky thing to predict.
Lets put aside for the moment considerations as to whether AI is going to become sentient, take over the world and religate humans to the trashbin of history. This may be the subject of a future blog. Instead lets look at the impact AI will have on your career and your work. Consider for a moment a very simple curve:
Lets say this curve represents AI’s impact on our careers and our work as at now. There has been some impact but not a wholesale disruption. We see glimpses of future impact, for example consider the recent memo sent to all staff of e-commerce giant Shopify:
Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI.
Shopify Memo 8 April 2025
And yet, most of the AI talk is future focused, “AI will…” more than “AI has…”
Which way is that curve going to go? To call this a million dollar question would be to massively understate the value of correctly predicting this trend. Global giants like Microsoft, with its recent 13 billion dollar investment in OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, are throwing billions at AI technology. They can afford to. Companies without Microsoft’s resrouces are standing on the sidelines; do I go all in or continue to wait and let the big boys duke it out?
Exponential Growth? …
If AI is just on the beginning of a hocky stick growth curve, we need to have a sense of urgency in our AI discussions and decisions. AI has already proven to be very disruptive in a short space of time. If this is only the start we need to start investing some serious time, effort and resources into this thing.
… or just another over-hyped tech trend?
Here’s the other possibility. We are infact at the peak of AI’s growth curve. From here on it levels out. In 5 years time we’ll be sitting in a coffee shop and the conversation will be along the lines of “that whole AI thing didn’t really pan out how the techies said it would”.
Consider Virtual Reality (VR) technology. Meta, owers of Facebook and Instagram, purchased what is now Reality Labs in 2014 and to date has invested over 80 billion dollars. 10 years later the only people I have seen wearing those strange looking googles have been on television. It may yet go exponential but it hasn’t as of now.
“The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.”
sung The Doors cheerfully in Roadhouse Blues, released in 1970. We none of us know where that curve is going to go.
Over the next few weeks, months and perhaps years I will be releasing some blogs that will help us form views on how this whole AI thing is going to pan out. Stay tuned!
